Successfully upgraded to F9 while keeping KDE 3

[Roberto Ragusa]

Hi all,

I managed to upgrade my F8 to F9 while keeping KDE 3,
and it was certainly a bit beyond the abilities of
a power user, but not too difficult.
(refer to my previous thread "F8 -> F9 but keeping
KDE3: technically feasible?")
Apparently nobody tried that before, so I will describe
the process for anyone interested (including google).


In a few words: I upgraded via yum, with "--exclude=kde\*",
but there are some little hairy details.


- Modified the repo config to hardcode the F9 repository instead
of 8. Well, not, I really downloaded the entire Everything
directory (13GB) on a local disk and used createrepo to have
my own full and fast repo.


- Tried

"yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=ROB9_fedora_everything 
--exclude=kde\* upgrade"

and got a list of dependency problems.
Rerun the command adding "--exclude=extragear-plasma".
The list was big but not too scary.
In the mean time, I upgraded yum and rpm (it is considered good
practice).


- Some problems were very "peripheric", that is, were just caused
by one or two packages: I simply used "yum remove" to remove
the packages and kept note of them so I could readd them later.
Some were old and unofficial stuff; just to give you an
idea: ktorrent, compiz\*, alsaplayer, omgtools, transcode, vlc,
pdftk, ckermit, cdecl, blender.
The list got smaller.

- The big issue appeared to be libssl.so.6 and libcrypto.so.6,
as F9 switched to version so.7, but KDE3 needs v6 (openssl
0.9.8g vs 0.9.8b). While looking for a compat rpm, I was
lucky to find a .src.rpm at

   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=440560

which I rebuilt easily (on F8) to get my compat rpm.


- Second issue: liblber-2.3.so.0 and libldap-2.3.so.0,
which come from openldap-2.3.39 (F9 has 2.4.8).
I downloaded the .src.rpm from F8 and modified the spec
(Name: and a couple of %{name}) so I got another compat
rpm I called openldap2339.


- Third issue: libmikmod.so.2, which entangles to KDE3
somehow through xmms-libs. I got the .src.rpm from F8
and modified the spec to create my mikmod322 rpm.


- Fourth issue: libopensync.so.0 libosengine.so.0 which
are related to kdepim-libs. Created my libopensync022
by modifying the F8 src.rpm.


- Fifth issue: libtcl8.4.so and tibtk8.4.so, but they were
just needed for PIL (needed for scribus and others).
There is a good PIL rpm in atrpms: PIL-1.1.6-8.fc9.i386.rpm.


- So, finally I created my second local repository with
these packages:

libopensync022-0.22-4.fc8.i386.rpm
libopensync022-debuginfo-0.22-4.fc8.i386.rpm
mikmod322-3.2.2-6.fc8.i386.rpm
mikmod322-debuginfo-3.2.2-6.fc8.i386.rpm
openldap2339-2.3.39-3.fc8.i386.rpm
openldap2339-debuginfo-2.3.39-3.fc8.i386.rpm
openssl098b-0.9.8b-1.fc8.i386.rpm
openssl098b-debuginfo-0.9.8b-1.fc8.i386.rpm
PIL-1.1.6-8.fc9.i386.rpm


- Retried the yum upgrade. Other dep problems were solved
by removing some stuff (mplayer, openvpn, lrzip, lzop,...).


- Another small issue could only be solved out of yum, with:

rpm -e --nodeps libraw1394_8-1.3.0-3_11.fc8.i386
rpm -Uhv RPMS.everything/libraw1394-1.3.0-6.fc9.i386.rpm


- Tried yum again:

yum upgrade --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=ROB9_fedora_everything 
--enablerepo=ROB9_fedora_mycompat --exclude=kde\* --exclude=extragear-plasma

This time the upgrade succeeded.

Install    124 Package(s)
Update    1793 Package(s)
Remove       2 Package(s)

At this point the system was still perfectly running
(I upgraded with X and firefox running, I just avoided
starting new things during the upgrade).


- Finally rebooted the machine to switch to the new system.
The machine was not able to shutdown correctly because
of the documented init/upstart change I forgot.
So, it was an unclean reboot to F9 (reiserfs complained
about replayed transactions on restart).


- Got to runlevel 3. Installed some rpms from livna as
I need the nvidia binary driver.


- Switched to runlevel 5. Logged in as usual, my KDE3
desktop started up perfectly.


- Activated all the F9 repos I normally use and ran yum
a few times to update everything and install the stuff
I had removed before (mplayer, vlc,...).


- Realized that a few F9 KDE3 packages can be installed:
kdevelop, kdevweb, kdesvn, kdetv (but not kdepim-libs).


Everything is running fine; KDE3 is as perfect as before,
including removable media, pulseaudio audio etc.

The yum/rpm dependency rules proved very robust; I just had
to satisfy a few deps, while tons of other deps
were handled automatically.
The (qt.rpm, qt4.rpm -> qt3.rpm, qt.rpm) switch happened
totally unnoticed.

This convoluted F9 upgrade actually was very smooth.
The "normal" upgrade to F8 (with anaconda) was a disaster
for me.
But this time there was no need to restore my preupgrade
backup. :-)

The biggest issue is now that some firefox extensions are
unavailable on version 3...

Thank you to everyone involved in such a great distro.

-- 
    Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it