BeigeJournal

I recently upgraded my Red Hat 8 system to the new Fedora Core 2. Red Hat 8 is getting old enough that installing new software is sometimes complicated by aging libraries, so the time had come to take a functioning computer and mess with it.

I have broadband Internet now, so I downloaded the 2.1 gigabytes comprising four install CD ISOs and the emergency boot disk ISO using BitTorrent. I started in the late evening and it was done by morning, though I let the uploads continue until evening.

After making sure my data was safely backed up, I ran the upgrade. It took a few hours to grind through and install everything. I had planned to use the stock kernel rather than compiling my own, but for some reason USB was not working and no USB modules were installed. I suspect that the upgrade program tries to just upgrade what was already installed according to the RPM database, and since I was running a 2.6 kernel compiled myself it was confused. I built my own kernel using the sources installed by the upgrade, which worked fine, although, as usual, it took a few tries to enable every feature that I actually need. In particular, it turns out that I do need the OSS sound emulation, since Baudline doesn’t support ALSA.

Overall, I was very impressed with how well the upgrade worked. Sometimes you can spend weeks gradually fixing all the things that stop working after an upgrade, but virtually everything was working fine after this one, aside from the kernel issue. I lost my customized menu bar, of course, and had to add all my launchers and monitors again. There were a few other programs I had to add, again probably a result of my installing most of my additions from source tarballs rather than RPMs.

Fedora Core 2 ships with Gimp 2, which in nice, except for the lack of gimp-print support. Supposedly recent version of gimp-print will work with it, and I’ll have to compile one if I need gimp-print before an “official” version is in the RPM repositories. On the other side, XSane works fine, though I had to fetch it since I’d installed it from tarball.

Printing has changed over to CUPS, and I could not get the configuration program to update the configuration until I deleted /etc/printcap, then it configured and worked fine.

I’ve not generally been a fan of the RPM system, partly because I don’t understand the rpm program. The documentation seems to randomly, or perhaps alphabetically, mix the sort of information needed by the people at Red Hat assembling an RPM-based distribution with the sort of information needed by ordinary users trying to install something. The other problem has been dependency hell, in which any addition requires the very latest version of five huge libraries, which in turn require the very latest version of ten other huge things, which in turn have still more dependencies on yet more huge things. Compiling from source tarballs is easier—configure, make, make install. As long as the system is reasonably recent everything is probably close enough to up to date for the compile to work. My desire to upgrade was partly driven by the fact that the system is just starting to get old enough that new version of some of the libraries are needed for some programs.

We now have programs like yum and apt-get, which can automatically determine all the dependencies and download and install them all at once rather than leaving the user to keep trying to install only to find yet another dependency to download and install first. I now have broadband Internet, which can download at upwards of 300 kilobytes per second rather than 3 kilobytes per second, so a hundred megabytes of updates is basically trivial rather than a show-stopper. I think I’ll be keeping much more up to date now.