fedup Fedora 18 to Fedora 20

So, I really didn't get fed up with Fedora 18, but I used fedup to upgrade to Fedora 20 and was pretty happy with the results. I was considering trying another distro, but was really happy with Fedora 18, then today I came across some software that I wanted to try but it was only available for Fedora 2O. I looked into updating my system and fedup was the suggested solution to upgrade. I had access to a really fast internet connection today, so I decided if I was going to try this , today would have to be the day. This saved me a ton of time on the downloading packages part of this post. All in all the entire process took about two hours. Here's what I did and what happened.

NOTE: You must use su or sudo for all commands ! If you don't have a really fast internet connection add some time to your install for package downloads. This could take some time.

So I decided to try the fedup upgrade from Fedora 18 to Fedora 20 . The first thing I did was read the wiki on fedup here.

As per the instructions I did a full system update to insure everything was compatible with fedup.

yum update

I'm glad I did this because I did make a few changes to Grub that I forgot about and that may have affected the upgrade. The update reset grub back to it original configuration. 

Once Fedora 18 was fully updated I installed fedup

yum install fedup

You want to make sure you download fedup-0.8.0-3  as per my research earlier versions can be buggy. Once fedup was installed I rebooted the computer to make sure all the changes and updates took effect.

Once the computer rebooted I typed

fedup --network 20 --nogpgcheck

Unfortunately I didn't notate my notes as to why, but the --nogpgcheck is necessary when updating from 18 to 20 but not when updating from 19 to 20 . 

At this point if you don't have Chrome browser installed everything should go easy peazy. Skip the Chrome steps.  If you do have Chrome installed continued reading.

Chrome

So here's where I ran into my first problem.

Downloading failed: failure: repodata/filelists.xml.gz from google-chrome: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

Google-chrome and google-repositories really goofed me up good for about 15 minutes.  If you run google-chrome uninstall it.

yum remove google-chrome

yum clean all

yum clean metadata

Then disable the google repositories

yum-config-manager --disable google-chrome

Once I did this I ran the

fedup --network 20 --nogpgcheck

And everything went fairly smoothly from there. fedup took care of just about everything. At the end of it, where it asks to reboot, I ended up with a couple warnings but at that point I think its almost to late to make any changes. I did some research before I did the reboot and it looked like the warnings were bugs, and o.k. to ignore. This was kind of scary, but all went well. If you get any warnings USE A SEARCH ENGINE AND MAKE SURE ITS BUG AND NOT AN ACTUAL PROBLEM. I think it should go without saying as well that you may want to backup any important data before you upgrade.

Once I rebooted , the entire install took a little over an hour on my computer. No problems at all, all data, and most of my configurations remained unchanged.  For a little clean up I simply did :

rpm --rebuilddb

I want to research doing additional clean up, because I know there are a lot of unused files left behind. After I do some research, that may be a post for another day.

And that's it, your done ! Hope this goes as smoothly for you as it did for me and enjoy your update Fedora 20 install. Good luck !

Remove Part of a Software Package Without Removing All Dependencies.

If you install a program using yum and you don't like some of the dependencies, and you know the program will run without them. You can use this command to remove  them.

rpm --nodeps -e packagename

The command basically tells rpm not to check for dependencies --nodeps and the -e is for erase. Replace packagename with whatever your removing.

If you try and use yum to just remove the dependency, in most cases it will try to remove the entire package. Using rpm allows you to just remove the one or two dependencies you don't want and leaves the rest of the install intact.

Bloggers note: update 10/19/13, using this will give you a warning the next time you use yum.  

Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum. 

Basically the warning is simply letting you know that the RPM database has been altered due to the dependency you removed with rpm and not using yum.
 
If you get this warning just use yum clean all

Yum local install localinstall

So you downloaded an rpm and need to install it locally. Download the file. Move the file to wherever you want to place your rpm files. I simply named mine rpms. In terminal, cd to your rpm directory.

cd rpms

yum localinstall whatever_the_file_name_fc18.x86_64.rpm

This comes in handy when you don't want to install an entire repository that you probably only need one file from. The downside is you want to make sure you already have all the dependencies, otherwise you need to download them and install them as well.

tcsd.service loaded failed - LSB: Init script for TCSD

When going through system logs, or maybe checking on your services you may have come across this error. tcsd.service loaded failed I found it checking on my services when my P.C. was acting a little funny. I looked for a little information on the problem, and most people said disable the service or remove the associated package. I wanted to know why, what it does, and why it was failing and here's what I found out.

What it is . Taken from an IBM site. TrouSerS is an open source Trusted Computing Group Software Stack (TSS) that is released under the Common Public License. TrouSerS aims to be compliant with 1.1b and 1.2 TSS specifications, which are available from the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) website at http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org.

Now TrouSerS works with a TPM chip. TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module. Here's a wiki on TPM. If you don't have a Trusted Platform Module chip, my understanding is that the TCSD service will look for the chip, not find it and fail. Using systemd-analyze and a tutorial found here for optimizing Fedora boot time we get an error like this:

tcsd.service - LSB: Init script for TCSD
Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/tcsd)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:38:48 -0400; 11min ago
Process: 1406 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/tcsd start (code=exited, status=137)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/tcsd.service

I typed this command as root:
/usr/sbin/tcsd -f
and received this output :
TCSD TDDL ERROR: Could not find a device to open!

I then did some research on Google to see if my laptop came with this TPM chip. I discovered my model didn't come with a TPM chip and decided to remove the Trousers package. In Fedora using KDE konsole I typed "yum erase trousers" , yum removed the package, I then rebooted the computer and no more problem. Another alternative would be to type as root "systemctl disable tcsd.service". This will disable the service and prevent it from showing up in your logs.

The TPM concept seems like a great idea, if I had the chip I think I would of opted to fix the problem. Unfortunately my research only went as far as fixing my machine. I may do some further research on this chip and get this option on my next computer build or laptop order.

Linux KDE FTP FileZilla

Now that I've decided to use my Linux partition on a daily basis, I needed to install some software. Last night I updated everything, and the system is running great. This morning it was time to start working. The first program I installed was FileZilla for FTP. After doing a little research, I decided to go with that program for the main reason that I'm comfortable using it. This is the same FTP program I used daily in my Windows partition. With Fedora the install was as easy as opening a terminal window and typing yum install filezilla. Yum found the program, the dependencies it needed, I typed y for yes and it was installed with no problems.

I then went to my hosts website, looked up the ftp help page, followed the instructions and was shortly ftp'ing into my account. Works just like it did in Windows, only it seems slightly faster in Linux. If you're not familiar with FileZilla you can click here for more information.

Blogger note : I'm going to be using my Linux partition on a daily basis now. I'll be trying to update the blog regularly. As I use programs, learn , and discover new ways to use Linux, I'll be adding notes. If you came across this, and need additional help with FileZilla FTP, leave a comment and I'll see if can help.