Cleaning up after F8-F9 upgrade: what must go? what needs to be added?

[Paul Johnson]

I need some tips from the school of hard knocks, and can share back
some tips as well.

I did the F8-F9 upgrade from DVD on an X86_64 system. It ran,
apparently, without trouble.

And when the system rebooted, it brought me to the black screen of
death known as grub.  I could type in commands, that was the good
sign.  (in case you wonder, type "help" to see if it lists out stuff
like root, reboot, boot, and so forth).  From comments here, this
problem is somewhat common on upgrades where systems have 2 hard
disks, a boot partition that is separate from the root partition, and
NO LVM.  I typed manually the commands needed to boot and eventually
brought the system up.  I checked the /etc/grub.conf and the UUID of
the root drive was set correctly, but noticed that
/et/boot/devices.map only included one of the hard disks.  I edited
the devices.map and added the second hard disk, and re-ran
"grub-install /dev/sda".  After that the system will boot.  (patting
myself on the back for making it that far).


(
In case you are stuck at the grub prompt, here's what to do. On my
system where the /boot partition is in the first partition on the
first disk-- /dev/sda1 and the / partition is on /dev/sda2, I type

root (hd0,0)
kernel vmlinuz... root=/dev/sda2
initrd initrd...
boot

The ... part will fill itself in if you hit tab a few times. If it
does not fill it in, it means you guessed wrong when you specified
root in the first command, because root tells it where to look for
your boot files.  Note "root" is used in 2 different senses here. The
first root refers to the boot partition's location.  If you don't know
which partition has your /boot, well, you are in some trouble, but it
will usually be the first partition that the linux installer creates.
The second line uses the word "root" in the sense of the root file
system of your installation, the place where "/" is installed.  Also
if your boot is not in a separate partition, then you specify root in
the first command as the same place where / is installed, but the
vmlinuz and initrd files will be under the /boot directory, so the
second and third lines would be
kernel /boot/vmlinuz... root=/dev/sda2
initrd /boot/initrd...
)


Next I tried to run "yum update" and it finds about 1GIG of packages,
but after a long time that fails because of conflicts between files in
the packages gnome-settings  and in compat-db for f8 and f9.  So I
manually remove those older versions, and run yum again, make sure the
new ones get installed.

So far, so good. Fedora is cutting edge, this proves it!

Next problem: can you help me figure out what stuff I should delete,
and what cool stuff I don't have installed?

I noticed in this list that xfs is deprecated and no longer installed
on new Fedora systems, but on my system, it is still running.  It is
kinda exciting, really, to consider just yanking the xfs package out

rpm -e xorg-x11-xfs-1.0.5-2.fc9.x86_64

and testing to see if X11 will still start.  Wow! That's exciting!

What other deprecated things am I still likely to be running?

What good things are not installed because the upgrader did not notice
I needed them?

I've perused the release notes, which are here:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/. I guess the xfs
news is so old it is not even mentioned there.

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas