upgrading RH 9 system->Fedora with iso files and apt only

[Panu Matilainen]

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, bishop wrote:

> Klaasjan,
> 
> Do you have the time to write out a mini-howto on that?  I have a 
> feeling that your instruction can help a few people following in your 
> footsteps, and who may not have the opportunity to figure out a working 
> solution by themselves.
> 
> Me, I need one that can reliably do it from 5000km away.  It'll be 
> loop-mounted ISOs, apt-get and similar craziness, I think.  Or I need to 
> book a flight.  8-)  Either way, I'm not the target audience, but I'm 
> close.  ACME at cl says that CL can do it with just apt-get, and that's 
> incredibly interesting.

Ok, since you need a remote upgrade then apt/yum/up2date is needed. For
apt you basically need to create a local repository of the RPMS. Suppose
you have the iso's mounted in /mnt/yarrow1, /mnt/yarrow2 and /mnt/yarrow3, 
I'd probably do it somewhat like this (watch out for typos and thinkos, I 
wrote this from top of my head so not tested.. ):
mkdir -p /var/tmp/fedora/RPMS.core
cd /var/tmp/fedora/RPMS.core
ln -s /mnt/yarrow1/Fedora/RPMS/* .
ln -s /mnt/yarrow2/Fedora/RPMS/* .
ln -s /mnt/yarrow3/Fedora/RPMS/* .
genbasedir --bloat /var/tmp/fedora

The add that to your sources.list: "file://var/tmp fedora core"
Check that it works (no errors in output) by running "apt-get update"
and then you should be ready to roll:
apt-get install kernel (choose suitable one from the output)
apt-get dist-upgrade

..and there it is, if all goes well. Note that there's a packaging issue 
which prevents a fully updated RHL 9 from being updated to FC 1 cleanly:
Latest RH errata has these packages:
perl-CGI 2:1.804-88.3
perl-CPAN 2:1.804-88.3
perl-DB_File 2:1.804-88.3

..and FC1 has this:
[pmatilai at chip]$ rpm -q --obsoletes perl
perl-Digest-MD5
perl-MIME-Base64
perl-libnet
perl-Storable
perl-CGI <= 2:2.81-88
perl-CPAN <= 2:1.61-88
perl-DB_File <= 2:1.804-88

Meaning that those three packages don't get obsoleted by the new perl 
package although they should, otherwise there are file conflicts. To get 
around that do "rpm -e perl-CGI perl-CPAN perl-DB_File" before running 
dist-upgrade. Nothing *bad* will happen if you dont remove those first, 
you just wont be able to run the upgrade before you do.

	- Panu -