Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4

Just completed an upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4. The upgrade wasn't uneventfull. Things got off to a bad start when the CD device didn't get off well with the media but that was easily overcome.

The first real annoyance occured when the installed refused to recognize my swap space. The swap is on a software raid array and the installer simply refused to continue and insisted on a reboot. Which is most annoying because this is a problem that could easily be fixed by editing the fstab file. Which is just what I did when the installer started up again after a reboot.

Just in case you have not done such a thing before: it's possible to bring up a shell by hitting Alt-F2 while the installer is running. Then you can temporarily mount the existing installation (if the installer has not already done so) and make any changes needed.

Though the swap space was now being accepted the installer again complained about a lack of disk space on the root partition (which is absurd I have gega bytes left on other partitions). So I logged in and deleted the /usr/share/docs folder to free up about 300Mb.

The Fedora installer rebooted (again) and this time continued on it's merry way until the third CD was inserted when it refused to install the kdewebdev RPM which suprised me because I had the media tested.

The system was rebooted yet again, and instead of booting the CD I decided to start up Fedora Core which it did but unfortunately an Xsession could not be started. So the next step was to install the RPM manually from the command line. This time an error about too many symbolic links was produced.

This symbolic link issue was tracked down to the fact that I had updated the PHP documentaion for Quanta by symlinking to the downloaded documentation. Deleted the symlink and tried the RPM again to see that it installed with out error. Now for the upteenth reboot and this time the installer ran to completion. And after spending nearly three hours on something that should have been completed in an hour I have a running Fedora Core installation.