Site With The Lamp

Upgrading Fedora is easy. It’s the post upgrade clean up that kills you. As already mentioned, the move from version 11 to 12, left behind 581 packages from F11. These should ideally be removed to avoid unexpected segfaults, system crashes and inconsistent behavior. It shouldn’t happen but it does happen, if you don’t cleanup now, later you will have a hard time figuring out some programs will not start up or package updates cannot be applied.  `package-cleanup –cleandupes` is a good starting point. This command will remove the older version from the system when there are two versions of the same package. Well that’s what it’s supposed to do, but it choked:

service fuse does not support chkconfig
error: %preun(fuse-2.7.4-3.fc11.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 1

Trying to manually remove the fuse package with yum gets you nowhere fast:

Running Transaction
service fuse does not support chkconfig
Error in PREUN scriptlet in rpm package fuse
fuse-2.7.4-3.fc11.x86_64 was supposed to be removed but is not!

Using `rpm -e` produces the exact same error as package-cleanup (which is because package-cleanup was merely passing through the error message it received from rpm). Fortunately the –noscripts paramter to rpm can be used to force the uninstall.

rpm -e –noscripts fuse-2.7.4-3.fc11.x86_64 fuse-2.8.1-1.fc11.x86_64

After the rpm command was executed in this manner, package-cleanup also would run to completion with out any errors. But it has a funny idea about what completion is; there are still 433  .fc11 rpms lying about. Most of these packages are from third party repos such as RPM fusion. A yum update ought to fix it and indeed the applying 684MB of updates resulted in all but 68 of the fedora 11 rpms disappearing from the system. Some of these are old kernels/kernels headers which can be removed with `package-cleanup –oldkernels` that still leaves around 60 rpms that you might have to manually uninstall and re install. You might also right the following simple command to remove them all en mass:

yum remove `rpm -qa | grep fc11`

The only catch is that it might remove some other important packages but putting those back in might be easier than removing 60 rpms one at a time. BTW why are these rpms tagged as FC11 or FC12, with FC standing for Fedora Core when the OS itself is no longer called Fedora Core? That name hasn’t been used for ages. Now it’s just Fedora