Now that I’m back from Red Hat Summit, I am ready to start upgrading my Fedora computers. Well, probably not the server or the living room HTPC - I’ll take advantage of the fact that Fedora supports the n-1 release to reduce headaches and downtime. As I’ve done for a few releases now, I used the dnf upgrade facility and it worked fine. So far things seem to be working as they should. I got a weird error that said vmlinuz-5.0….. crashed, but given that it was a .fc29 package, I’m going to let that slide for now unless it turns out that things start acting funky on the laptop.

My main computer is now on Fedora 24. This time around I only had to uninstall HDR Merge (which was from my COPR and I hadn’t built a Fedora 24 version yet) and OBS-Studio because there isn’t a Fedora 24 package for it yet. Not bad.

After rebooting, I didn’t have graphics. Then rebooting once more kicked the akmod into gear and now things appear to be working well. 2 more computers left to upgrade to Fedora 24 - the VM server and the Kodi living room box.

Upgraded the final computer - the server host that has the VM with our Kodi stuff. It was the least complicated upgrade - didn’t have to remove anything - it just worked. And that was a great change, for once. (Not that the others were too much of a pain).

For some reason gazebo-doc the Fedora 22 version conflicted with the Fedora 23 version so I had to delete that. Also, despite the system claiming that it would not have to download the packages again, it appeared to not actually work that way - at least the second time I ran things. (After removing Kernel-debug packages to get more space in /boot)

Overall, everything went relatively well. The only bad thing is that there was not a kmod-nvidia available for my current kernel in Fedora 23 so I had to boot into my old kernel in order to have the benefits of the proprietary driver. So later today if there’s time I’m going to see if there’s a kmod-nvidia for this kernel in rpmfusion-testing that I could install. Otherwise, I’ll just keep checking every few days and stay on the older kernel until then.

Now that it seems the nvidia driver that deals with the latest Xorg is available, I decided to try and upgrade my main computer, SuperMario. I started with the dnf commands:

dnf update --refresh
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=23

As usual, old packages reared their ugly heads. They’d made it this far, but it was time to banish packages from Fedora 20 and even Fedora 15 that had survived this long.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the next day, when I woke up, that plasma had loaded up despite the fact that I removed kmod-nvidia. Also, I did not have the same issue with KDM as I did with tanukimario. I was loaded in with the blue triangle background. I was greeted with the message “Your saved type “kde-plasma” is not valid any more. Please select a new one, otherwisee ‘default’ will be used.” I select “Plamsa” and am greeted with the KDE loading screen I’ve become oh-so familiar with.

Today was the big one, time to upgrade supermario, my workhorse machine. As usual I had to remove the kmod-nvidia packages. This time around, because my card was getting a little long in the tooth, it was the kmod-nvidia-340xx packages. I also had a bunch of plasmoid packages to get rid of that I didn’t need to remove on the other computers because I was only a heavy plasmoid user on this computer. Thankfully, I’d long since abandoned all the ones I had to get rid of. After running fedup 3 times (once initially, once after removing plasmoids, and once after removing kmod-nvidia packages) to make sure nothing was expected by the program to cause problems upon upgrade, I finally rebooted to upgrade. If the past is any indication, I should be able to get to a screen where I can reinstall kmod-nividia after the upgrades. I’m only a tiny bit worried that Fedora only seems to connect to the internet when a GUI comes up, but if it comes to that I’ll investigate what I need to do and be sure to publish the procedures here for anyone else in the same boat.

Today I upgraded my netbook. Interestingly, this had less problems than yesterday with the guest computer. Perhaps because I wasn’t using KDM on my netbook? Anyway, I was actually expecting a worse time, but it worked out. It appears that KDE Netbook edition didn’t make the jump to Plasma 5. But maybe it’s just a setting I need to discover. See, my netbook is a 2nd gen netbook - not a piece of garbage like our EEE Machine, but it has a sub-HD resolution and so using most programs is hard unless the Window Manager or Desktop Environment is getting rid of window decorations. So far, KDE 5 is OK. I may end up going to Fluxbox. (I did not like XFCE on this screen resolution) Here’s my desktop as of now:

Turns out that the issue was the Fedora SDDM theme. Once I changed that to the default KDE theme everything worked. I wonder what I need to do to get the Fedora theme so that works as well. At least I know for future computers what needs to be done.

Started off with the guest room computer as it’s the least used. If things go pear-shaped there’ll be less complaining. fedup had a complaint about the one of the dependencies of the Dolphin Emulator. I just uninstalled it for now. I’ll worry about reinstalling it later. Often during these upgrades it appears that the biggest source of issues are badly written dependencies; badly written in the sense that I end up having to remove the offending packages only to reinstall them post-upgrade without any issues.