Fedora 9’s Broken Install

Posted in: Technical Track

Fedora 9 was released on the 13th. I waited a whole three days to make sure I wasn’t going to be the beta-tester. Then I tried out the live release, and finally decided to upgrade my main workstation to Fedora 9 today. To be sure I wouldn’t mess stuff up, I used the DVD installer to upgrade.

The upgrade finished fine, but when I rebooted, XChat would not run.

[14:15:53]$ xchat
xchat: error while loading shared libraries: libperl.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

What did rpm have to say about this?

[14:26:31]$ rpm -q xchat
xchat-2.8.4-11.fc8.i386

[14:26:39]$

Hmm . . .  looks like the package did not get upgraded. Wondering how many others did not get upgraded, I did a quick check:

[14:26:39]$ rpm -qa | grep fc8|wc -l
139

Wow! 139 packages still carry the fc8 tag! Next I checked if the updates repository has the updates:

[[email protected] ~]# yum update
...

...
Transaction Summary
===================================================================
Install     18 Package(s)
Update     148 Package(s)
Remove       0 Package(s)

While I didn’t check all the packages in the list, XChat is definitely there:

xchat                   i386       1:2.8.4-15.fc9   fedora            1.3 M

So did Fedora just push out a release with old packages just to stay on schedule, and is actually releasing packages now hoping nobody would notice? I mounted the install DVD (all 3.4G of it, by the way) and checked:

[[email protected] Packages]# rpm -q xchat
xchat-2.8.4-11.fc8.i386
[[email protected] Packages]# rpm -q xinetd
xinetd-2.3.14-14.fc8.i386
[[email protected] Packages]# ls -ltrh xch*
ls: cannot access xch*: No such file or directory
[[email protected] Packages]# ls -ltrh xinet*
ls: cannot access xinet*: No such file or directory
[[email protected] Packages]#

These packages are just not there! And now I’m doing a network upgrade. It makes me wonder what I got for 3.4G worth of downloaded DVD. Readers — any similar experiences or advice?

Oh well . . .  on to better (!?) things — I will be installing Oracle next to see how that works on this shiny new distribution. Expect a report soon.

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About the Author

Raj has been managing and guiding highly effective teams for over 20 years. Raj combines strong leadership skills with a deeply technical background in IT consulting to bring tailored and efficient technology solutions to Pythian. Additionally, his focus on data security has helped Pythian meet and often exceed client and regulatory requirements. Prior to joining Pythian in 2003, Raj held various leadership positions with a proven record of success. He has a degree in Industrial Engineering and has worked in multiple IT and engineering fields.

7 Comments. Leave new

hey Raj. Have you added the livna repository, now that it has F9 packages?

Reply

gvim wouldn’t work after upgrading from fedora 8 to fedora 9 – same error message. Now fedora 9 wants to download 312 M of updates. That will get me in trouble at work. I see vim-X11 is one of them. I’ll try just that.

yum update vim-X11

Well, at least that fixed it. What happens if you do a clean install of fedora 9? Do you get xchat and gvim (vim-X11) if you want them?

Reply
Raj Thukral
May 19, 2008 4:39 pm

the vim-X11 package is not on the DVD, and neither is the xchat package – so the only way you would get them is by installing over the net after the base install. Not good.

btw, Don, I added the livna repositories at work and the freshrpms at home – both are incomplete as of now.

Also, the nvidia driver is not compatible with the new Xorg ABI (can be forced with an ignore ABI directive but it doesn’t give you 3D, just basic functionality.

cheers!
–Raj.

Reply
Leon Mattinson
May 22, 2008 6:11 pm

I have tried Linux and like it But would like which one you think is the best? It is time we had something that isn’t (Microsoft) Would some one send me an email and let me know what they think. Thanks for your time. I live in Ottawa

Reply

It’s even more fun if you try a clean install from the DVD ISO. A bare bones install works just fine. Heaven help you if you actually want a usable system after the install (where ‘usable’ is defined as modifying which packages do — and do not — get installed). I’ve been using Redhat/Fedora since the days of Redhat 6 and this is by far the buggiest install process I have ever seen.

Reply
Alven Trenner
October 29, 2008 1:18 am

i downloaded fedora 9. i put it on dvd. and when i tried to install it….. no luck….. from the beggining it didn’t work not even menu didn’t came out. i downloaded it 4times don’t know what else to do.

Reply
Movies rapidshare
November 7, 2008 8:15 pm

yo…

exellent…

Reply

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