Fedora 11 Preview

2009 May 18 at 07:26 » Tagged as :

A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded Fedora 11 and a couple of days ago I managed to find the time to install it on my desktop. It was running Fedora 10 at the time and the upgrade, like all past upgrades didn't go smoothly. Since I have had so much trouble with Fedora updates in the past, my tactic is to first install on a virtual machine to test it out. Invariably the virtual machine installation proceeds smoothly it's only when you try the real thing that you run into trouble. To be accurate the upgrade did go smoothly and it was the post installation configuration/firstboot that failed. As usual, grub installation was messed up and the system didn't start up until I booted the DVD in rescue mode and re installed grub. This is par for the course. Every time I have updated fedora, I have had to do that. On booting up, It seemed that each service waits twenty seconds to start up. Some of them didn't start at all [FAILED] but when the system got to atd it got completely stuck and stopped responding at all. Booting again into rescue mode, I found that most of the symbolic links to the .so files in /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 are missing. Worse yet, some of the shared objects from Fedora 10 hadn't even been replaced. No wonder this is getting stuck. I tried to manually install or update the missing libraries but rpm itself was broken (rpmbuild.so missing). When that happened in the past I have been able to use the rpm2cpio tool to manually install the contents of an rpm. This had to be done on a second computer and the files brought over (with a USB stick ssh is also dead) to the effected machine. Unfortunately all that effort didn't get me anywhere because rpm still complained :

rpm: symbol lookup error: rpm: undefined symbol : rpmConfigDir

I never found out what causes it. After a lot of googling, I just gave up and reinstalled from scratch over the existing installation. I can afford to do that because my drives have been properly paritioned and I am not going to lose any data by doing this.