Upgrade to Fedora14

This time also, I updated Fedora using yum. On this occasion, the update was more challenging. The update failed in the middle and I had to recover the system from an inconsistent state.

I started the upgrade with the usual  first step.
$sudo rpm -Uv fedora-release-14-1.noarch.rpm

Next step was to empty the /var/cache/yum directory and started
$sudo yum update

It needed to download 2.6GB. The downloads succeeded and the update started. I was updating the system from a diskless system, in retrospect an unnecessary risk. My wife was working on the main system. The GUI sessions got stuck after a few hours. It seemed that the update had finished. I rebooted and the system seemed fine except that evolution failed to start.

A little investigation indicated that yum update had failed. I started
$sudo yum-complete-transaction
But after a considerable time, it indicated that the package database was not in a proper state and it could not continue. The rpmdb had both fc13 and fc14 packages installed for quite a few packages.

I used
$sudo package-clean --cleandupes

It took several hours but completed successfully. I now reran
$sudo yum update

This succeeded; however, package-clean seemed to have removed the desktop environments I was using - gnome, kde and LXDE. I had to reinstall these desktop environments. Since the packages had already been downloaded, it did not take time.

I am now working with Fedora 14 and install any missing packages as I need them. The time taken - a day. Not too bad given the problems encountered and the upgrade was certainly not boring this time.