Inactive logical volume after upgrading to Fedora 19

I upgraded my netbook to Fedora 19 beta version using yum. The process was smooth and went through without a hitch.

The problem came up on rebooting. Systemd waited and finally failed to mount home, which was a logical volume. This seemed strange as root and swap were also on the same volume group and were being used.

Finally, lvscan showed that the home logical volume was inactive. The command

lvchange --activate y 

worked and it was a relief to realize that the home logical partition was perfectly fine.

Unfortunately, rebooting the system showed the same problem. The cause of the problem was that all the lvm2 services were disabled.

Enabling lvm2-monitor.service resolved the issue :)

Upgrading to Fedora 18 using Yum - Nouveau causes system freeze?

The documentation for upgrading fedora using yum seems to be much better than before. A very nice script which automates the instructions was terrific. The upgrades of my desktop and the netbook were very smooth. After the upgrade, I installed the Cinnamon desktop as well. It is very nice though I will stick to KDE as I am now comfortable with it.

There was, however, a surprise on the desktop. On booting into Fedora 18, the display vanished and the system hung. The system came up in muti-user mode but not in graphical interface. Gdm was the problem. I switched to kdm. The login screen came and was fine in KDE. However, the system again froze when I tried Cinnamon or Gnome desktops. LXDE worked but the system froze as soon as I started Firefox!

KDE desktop was working with desktop effects disabled. If I enabled them, the desktop froze.

The desktop worked fine with the nomodeset option for booting the kernel. However, it was using the vesa driver. So, the problem is with nouveau driver on "GeForce 6150SE nForce 430" hardware.

Another curious result. The system is working fine with the kernel 3.6.11-1.fc17.x86_64 from fedora 17, which has made it possible to continue with Fedora 18 on the desktop.

Need to reconfirm the problems I faced on the desktop as I did not find a bug report with similar issues.

On Lenovo S10-3, I have so far not faced any issues related to the upgrade.

Upgrading to Fedora 17 - using yum

Since my experience with preupgrade on the desktop was not so great, I decided to take a chance with upgrading my Lenovo S10-3 netbook to fedora 17 using yum.

The additional steps of modifying the filesystem using dracut were not really complex.

Most of the packages had already been downloaded by preupdate, which I had preserved. I copied them into the cache of  yum and executed:

# yum --releasever=17 --disableplugin=presto distro-sync

Unfortunately, after updating about 500 packages, yum seemed to be doing nothing. I killed the command. And ran yum-complete-transaction. It seemed to be using the repositories of Fedora 16 even though fedora-release files had been installed. So, I ran

# yum-complete-transaction --releasever=17

After a pretty long time, it told me that there were problems. I tried again with

# yum-complete-transaction --releasever=17 --skip-broken

An equally long wait and no better result. The problem was that rpm database had entries for both 16 and 17 versions for the packages which were updated.

The following command also did not help (Next time, I need to try with  the -t option to see if it would have tolerated errors).

# package-cleanup --cleandupes

The problem was that packages which had not yet been updated depended on the duplicates. Had I allowed this script to run, it would have deleted most of the packages.

I found a python script I had written when an upgrade from FC7 had failed because of power failure. The script created a file with the list of older duplicates, which could be used as an input to rpm as below:

# rpm --nodeps -e `cat deleteList.txt`

Finally, I cleaned up the failed yum transaction and ran:

# yum --releasever=17 --disableplugin=presto distro-sync

This time, the upgrade finished cleanly. Although it took about the same time and effort as the preupgrade, I enjoyed solving these problems a bit more.

Firefox crashes

As on the desktop, firefox crashed with even a few tabs. It seemed to be a random problem. However, I downloaded Firefox 12 from Mozilla and firefox works fine!

Updgrading to Fedora 17 - preupgrade

I took this advice in upgrading via yum seriously :

However Fedora 17 is very special. You should seriously consider stopping now and just using anaconda via. DVD or preupgrade, unlike all previous releases it's what the yum/rpm developers recommend. Continue at your own risk.

I decided to use preupgrade. I would have preferred yum as I would have more control over the update even if it were riskier. Anyway, the preupgrade went through nicely overnight. About 4 GB was downloaded and I was ready for the final stage.

Uses grub2 

I rebooted the system and it did nothing. I have continued to use grub and had not migrated to grub2. Preupgrade had created a new file grub.cfg in /boot/grub2. After failing to get the upgrade kernel to boot from grub, I installed grub2. It was easier than I had feared. It left the grub.cfg file untouched. I rebooted and the upgrade started.

It soon told me that I needed an additional GB of space. After making the additional space, I rebooted and the upgrade started. Everything was fine until it was cleaning up files. It just wouldn't end. I noticed at least 3 times glibc being cleaned up. There was little option but to reboot.

The reboot went through the upgrade process and felt that everything was done. I was ready to reboot into Fedora 17, except that the grub.cfg file was still the same and the preupgrade files had been removed. Fortunately, using the minimal editor in grub, I could boot using the F17 kernel. The first thing I did was to create a new grub.cfg file. The fireworks on the desktop looked nice.

SSH and password-less login

One minor issue was that I needed to give the password for using ssh from my remote system. I needed to copy authorized_keys2 to authorized_keys in .ssh.

Firefox crashes

Firefox seems to crash with a few tabs. It seems to be a random problem. However, if I download Firefox 12 from Mozilla, it works fine!

Save preupgrade files in case you want to upgrade more than one system.

I did not want to download the files again for my netbook. As a precaution, I had saved all the preupgrade files, in particular the rpm packages. As I feared, it cleaned up and even though keepcache was set, there were no packages of fedora 17 in the yum cache after the upgrade.

First Experiments with Ubuntu 11.10

The upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 went through smoothly on Lenovo S10-3 netbook. It looks very similar to 11.04. An application would normally use the full screen as expected. I tried to start a new application and couldn't. No matter where or how hard I pushed the mouse, the dash would not appear.

Finally, I remembered the 'window' key! Having found the workaround, I have not had a chance to experiment with it more as I normally use Arch Linux on the netbook and Fedora on the desktop.

At IIT, Ropar, the default desktops are Ubuntu. So, I decided that I would try to upgrade my LTS desktop to oneiric. I certainly wasn't going to upgrade in steps. The choice was between a fresh installation or an forced update and do what is not recommended - strongly.

The latter is more fun and I hoped to learn something. I changed the sources file to use the oneiric repositories. My installation was fairly simple so I did not expect any significant issues. At worst, some packages would be broken.

Unfortunately, the upgrade failed - too many errors. The last error was a fairly simple error of some conflict in a file in two packages. I made the mistake of rebooting inspite of the broken packages!

The system no longer boots - not even grub menu :(

Well, I will now have to do a fresh installation - and haven't understood what went wrong.

Fedora 15 Upgrade - NetworkManager and rsyslog need to be enabled

The NetworkManager and rsyslog services were failing to start after the upgrade of the systems from Fedora 14. The workaround was working so well that I did not get around to looking into the issue till today.

A quick search for the error:

Unit dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service failed to load: 
No such file or directory.

The solution appeared to be that I needed to enable the service:

$sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager.service

It created symlinks in /etc/systemd/system and /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/ folders.

Since this was likely to be the solution, I also tried

$sudo systemctl enable rsyslog.service

This also created a symlink in /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/.

I removed the workaround script in /etc/rc.local. As expected, the system worked fine.

If I come across any more services which fail to start at boot time, e.g. nfs, I know what to try first.

I am, though, still curious - why is the ethernet device still eth0!

Printer Issue after upgrade to Fedora14

I had not realised that I had not used the printer after upgrading to Fedora 14, hence, I suspected the printer. The printer was recognised. Cups would say - printing over. But there was not printout. There appeared to be no interaction with the computer at all.

The printer worked on the netbook, so the problem had to be with Fedora 14 on my desktop. Since everything seemed fine, I removed all referenced to the HP Deskjet, in particular /etc/cups/printers.conf, and that identified the issue.

Now, cups complained. It needed some more packages - foomatic and hpijs. As the upgrade had failed, these two packages were among the ones not installed and had not caused any issues till I decided to use the printer!

Mint introduces a rolling option!

I haven't tried Mint. But it was a pleasant surprise to read that Mint will have a rolling distribution based on Debian testing repository. I have been convinced for some time that we should not have to change our OS - ever(at least for a long-long time). I was reminded of it by a blog entry about Windows vs Ubuntu release cycle.

I have been very happy with Arch Linux since Jan 2010. I haven't switched all my home systems because the range of applications available in Fedora repositories is considerably greater. I suppose I could use the rawhide repositories and that would be like a rolling distribution. However, the risk of the system breaking with that option is likely to be very high.

I am planning to use Arch Linux as the primary version on Lenovo S10-3 netbook using KDE's netbook style as the needs are well defined. The initial setup effort is worth the smoother subsequent operation.

I am not opting for Arch Linux because it is 'faster'. I do not know if that is even correct.

Nor am I doing so to have a fine control over the packages installed.

I am opting for it to so that I do not have to decide when to upgrade!

Migrating to Fedora 13

I had updated to fedora 13 soon after it was released - following the update approach as I have been doing for several years now.

I downloaded and updated fedora-release-13-1.noarch.rpm

Next step -

yum -update

Well, it failed. It complained about a number of packages and suggested I try

yum -update --skip-broken

Failed again. One of the problem packages was rb_libtorrent-python.

It could not be removed as Miro depended on it. It seemed strange.

'yum update Miro' worked and installed a few more dependencies. However, Miro stopped working and the update broke a few other packages - e.g. Firefox.

I reverted back to the original state. Erased Miro and rb_libtorrent-python.

Now, I could update the system using

yum -update --skip-broken

But it cautioned me that

Skipped (dependency problems):
mutter-mbl x86_64 2.28.1_0.12-1.fc13 fedora 1.2 M
mutter-moblin x86_64 0.43.8-4.fc13 fedora 2.4 M

I decided to clean the two packages before updating. I was not using moblin now, so I erased the group 'Moblin Desktop Environment'

The above two packages did not get erased and had to be removed manually.

After that the upgrade was fairly smooth other than the unstable network I was experiencing. I had to restart update about a couple of dozen times before the downloads were completed! Over 2 GB of packages were downloaded. Sadly, delta-rpm's still play no role across fedora versions.

After moving to Fedora 13, installing Miro was a breeze. There were no issues at all. So, what was the problem with rb_libtorrent-python?

The version on f12 was 0.14.10-1 while on f13 it was lower 0.14.8-2!

Subsequently, I noticed that java-1.6.0-openjdk was higher in f12 than in f13. However, it did not cause any issue in upgrading the system. Java openjdk package for f12 was retained. Packages updated from f13 repository did not complain about the mis-match of repositories.

By contrast, one of my systems with Arch Linux is using the same or higher versions of packages as Fedora 13. The packages have been steadily updated over a period of time with minimal friction.

Update to Ubuntu 10.04

I downloaded the alternate iso for Ubuntu 10.04, mounted it as /media/cdrom and ran the update script.

A couple of hours later, the update was uneventfully completed while I browsed the internet and handled my emails.

I know the update is done as the theme is different and I have to move the mouse from the upper right corner to the upper left corner for closing or minimising a window.

The boot seemed to be stuck for about 10 seconds, but then the graphics display appeared. It lasted another 10 seconds and the gdm login screen appeared. I will explore the changes in the boot process of the new version of Ubuntu. However, signing in and being able to use the system took over half a minute. Overall, the time span from boot to a usable system was a little more than a minute.

And I noticed that the OpenOffice now has the Oracle logo on it.

I use Ubuntu only occasionally at home. I will explore it more at work, where I am curious whether the problems with X and old intel graphics chipset persists.

Replicating Arch Linux

I had frequently taken a backup of the root partition, restored it on another system and it would work, with some minor changes to the fstab file. I decided to replicate Arch Linux the same way.

I took a backup of the functioning system in Chandigarh and brought it to Goa. Restored it, made the minimal changes in grub.conf and fstab - and Surprise. The kernel crashed. The problem seemed simple enough.

Chroot to the Arch Linux partition. Reinstall the kernel. Reboot and getting ready to relax with a cup of tea. No luck. Kernel crashed again and again.

Installed the core Arch Linux from a usb image. This time the system worked!

Next step - saved the kernel and the image. Restored the tar backup. Copied the installed kernel and the image. The system worked! Reinstalled the updated kernel (2.6.32) and the system still worked.

I used the EEPC701 as the gateway to connect to the Internet and started to add some packages, e.g. NetworkManager to use the Reliance Netconnect USB modem. Pacman complained. I chose to ignore the warnings and forced the additional packages. And the system stopped working. I was back to kernel crashes.

I had to look at how the packages were stored and realised the issue. Arch Linux keeps installed and available packages as directories and files. Restoring the tar backup resulted in updated and original packages both being listed. It resulted in a very confused package manager.

So, back to installing from the USB drive. This time I removed the package manager 'database', that is the directories in /var/lib/pacman. Now the restored package database was consistent. The system has been working fine.

I have to re-examine the tar backup. I must have missed something.

My Worst Experience with Fedora GUI

I have been upgrading my parents computer since Fedora 8 by using yum update options.

I decided that before moving to Fedora 12, I should cleanup some of the packages. I decided to use the gui - packagekit and opted for removal of development group and some language packages like arabic which my parents did not need.

Packagekit mentioned that packages depending on these will also be removed. I clicked ok. For a moment, it did seem to me that the number of packages meant for removal was larger than I had expected. Anyway, I could always fix the problem if some needed package was removed.

After 20 minutes or so, packagekit had done its job. I could find very few packages. I decided check what was installed and rpm was missing! yum was missing.

All the rpm packages were present in /var/cache but there was no way I could use them. The machine had no cd drive. Anyway, I found that I had no installation media for Fedora 11.

So, the only option which came to me - clean install Fedora 12. I downloaded the net installation cd. Removed a cd drive from another computer and installed it on my parents computer. The installation is in progress for the last 6 hours.

Removing implicitly installed packages

It is easy to install a new package. Yum/synaptic will find the dependencies and install them.

How about removing a package?

It is hard to remove packages which were installed because of dependencies. E.g. install mplayer and dozens of packages get added. Now, remove mplayer but the packages installed implicitly remain installed.

On Fedora, package-cleanup provides some assistance but not enough.

Wanting to test a new version

Package management should make it easy to test some packages. E.g. I would like to try Firefox 3.6.

If I try to use the rawhide repository, it has a dependency problem. I skip packages with dependency problem. It offers to install 14 packages, upgrade 18 packages and skips installing Firefox!

I want to test Firefox, not upgrade Python from 3.6.2 to 3.6.4!

I can and do test the beta version by downloading it from the Mozilla site.

Often end-users will want to test and try packages like firefox, openoffice for small improvements which matter to them. They will not want to figure out the dependency issues of testing a Fedora 13 package on Fedora 12. Nor are they likely to search the OpenOffice or Fedora sites for the beta versions.

Since end users are likely to remain within a distribution, wider testing of common packages needs help from package managers by Fedora and Ubuntu.

Package managers should allow a test version of a common package to be installed easily without getting rid of the stable version and allow users to test and provide feedback on the features that matter to them.

An Analysis of an Upgrade to Fedora 12

The upgrade to Fedora 12 required over 2gb of download. I wanted to measure some of the changes in the upgrade for my usage.

Number of packages installed increased by 131 packages. (F11:2232, F12:2363)

Some packages like the kernel and gpg-keys have multiple versions installed and some have both x64 and i386 architecture packages installed. Hence, let us consider the unique package names.

Unique package names increased by 121 packages (F11:2087, F12:2208)

26 packages present in F11 were removed, while 147 were added.

Among the common packages, 1289 had the same version in both F11 and F12. They differed in the release value.

Of these, 343 differed in the version after the 2nd decimal place and can be regarded as fairly minor version changes.

62 differed in the major version number and 380 in the first minor version, e.g. gnome desktop going for 2.26.x to 2.28.x. A number of packages, e.g. sugar packages, have a single digit version number.

How many of these 442 packages could not have been incorporated in Fedora 11?

Would delta rpm packages not be feasible across the upgrade?

Could there be better ways of managing packages which can handle additional usage patterns?

I plan to explore some simple usage patterns I have found hard to do with current schemes of distributions. (I am also planning to install Arch linux as an example of a rolling distribution to see if they meet such needs.)

Another Upgrade - Fedora 12

Continuing with the strategy I have used with the last few upgrades, I installed fedora-release-12-1.noarch.rpm and cleaned the /var/cache/yum directory.

Next step was
sudo yum update --skip-broken

The upgrade went through and took about 20 hours on a 512Kbps line. The broken packages seemed to have been caused by desktop-data-model, which does not appear to be present in Fedora 12.

The installation was clean after I removed desktop-data-model and updated the broken packages.

At first glance, everything seemed fine. I could start an X session from a thin computer as well.

However, Miro wouldn't work. It seemed to run but no display. I subsequently found the same issue with Nautilus. Google search found a person with a problem using Nautilus and he could overcome it by removing gstreamer-plugins-ugly and gstreamer-plugins-bad. This worked for me as well though it did not seem very logical.

I reinstalled both one at a time to find the culprit. However, there was no problem! I presume the broken package during the upgrade may have been the cause of another ir-reproducible experience.

This time I have kept a record of the rpm packages and versions before the upgrade. I hope to analyse the versions to test my belief that the upgrade effort is excessive for the benefit. We need a better way to manage packages.

If I am convinced, I will explore Arch Linux or Gentoo and switch my parents' computer as well. My parents, who are over 80, have not had any difficulty in using Fedora for their common tasks, except when I compulsively update or upgrade their system for no particular reason and break some application. I am searching for a quick undo.

Overcoming Xserver issues on Ubuntu 9.10

Ubuntu 9.04 worked fine with 2.6.31 kernel. Switching between desktop applications was quick. This gave me the confidence of trying 9.10 again.

Xserver Freezing

Although the chipset in my system was 845 and I was not facing a blank screen on booting, I decided to use the recommendation of setting i915.modeset=0 for intel chipsets in the kernel options. Now, Ubuntu 9.10 worked well. However, the X server locked up once just before the end of the day.

Monitor Resolution Issue

For getting the monitor to work at 1280x1024 resolution, I had to add a mode line in xorg.conf file.

Progress but not yet perfect.

Getting around an Upgrade Constraint

I love to upgrade but can't compel my colleagues. So, while I use OpenOffice 3, the standard in the organisation is OO2. The documents I need to share are simple but, unfortunately, the indentation of bullets is lost when I create the document in OO3 and it is opened in OO2.

Hence, I use OO2.4 for documents I need to share with others. After installing Ubuntu 9.10, the OO2.4 installed in my personal directory would not work. Library version issue. OO2.4 needed older version of libicu libraries.

I simply copied the desired library files from the 9.04 partition and now both versions of OO work fine.

This again brings up one of the issues with current distributions. Linux allows multiple versions of libraries to exist easily. Should package managers help in keeping multiple version of some products? I believe they should. However, I also realise that it may not be easy add these capabilities into the existing distributions.

Ubuntu 9.10 - Problem with new Releases

I couldn't upgrade my Ubuntu 9.04 installation - the upgrade script wasn't on the desktop-iso I had downloaded. It wasn't critical as I had a free partition and installed Ubuntu 9.10 on that. A lucky move.

My initial reaction was very good. The 1280x1024 resolution of the monitor was not found; however, the desktop was significantly snappier on the 512 MB system. I had been expecting and looking forward to it because of the improvements in 2.6.31.

Then, I noticed that X-server would freeze occasionally. I learnt the Alt-SysRq-k combination instead of the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. I needed to use it often. After killing the X, the screen would usually be black and I could do nothing. I had to learn the Alt-SysRq-b combination as well!

I tried to find the cause for the X locking up but could not. It may not be just the Intel driver on an old 845 graphics chipset as Google search reports problems on Nvidia and ATI chipsets as well.

By the end of the day, I had gone back to 9.04. Then I decided to copy the 2.6.31 kernel and the modules on to the 9.04 partition. I booted 9.04 with the 2.6.31 kernel from 9.10 and the system was stable for the next half hour till the end of day.

Tomorrow, I will explore that environment further and am hoping that the problem is with X. If so, I will work with the snappier 9.04 unofficial upgrade.

This confirms my view that the current mechanism for distributions is now inappropriate. It is too disruptive and, potentially, very painful.

I will find time to explore a rolling distribution Arch linux or Gentoo. My hesitation so far has been that their repositories may not be as comprehensive as Fedora or Ubuntu. Now the benefits of a rolling distribution outweigh the drawbacks.

Converting Root Partition to ext4

Since I had updated the system to Fedora 11, the root filesystem was still ext3.
Boot directory is on a separate ext3 partition.

To get the maximum benefit of an ext4 system, I backed up the root. Reformatted it as ext4 and restored the backup.

The result - system would not boot. Booting into Ubuntu 9.04 and recreating the initrd after chroot to the Fedora 11 partition did not help.

I extracted the files in the initrd file and found that the change was simple. One line in 'init' file needed to be changed. The file system type had to be set to ext4 and the UUID changed to the current one.

mkrootdev -t ext4 -o defaults,noatime,nodiratime,ro UUID=6718a39a-2215-4e11-8716-455e7dcb11f4

Recreated the initrd file - remembering to use the cpio option -H newc

The system has been working fine.