fed up or fedup?

[Campbell Ritchie]

Bl**d* fedup program: won’t update my Fedora17 to F18. One computer did update, but now only runs headless. The other doesn’t seem to update, but it does delete my B43 wireless hardware driver.
I am going to have to do a clean installation. Twice. I now know why they called it fedup

[Richard Tookey]

I no longer even think about directly updating my Ubuntu systems to the latest version since only once has it worked successfully so I end up having to re-install everything anyway! Once a year I just backup my data and re-install everything from scratch; takes about a day to do both my laptop and my desktop. This has two other advantages; it clears out the years buildup of crud and it stops my blood pressure from going though the roof.

[Campbell Ritchie]

You partition your disc rather like this
|WindowsWindows||ext4 = /ext4 = mount as /homeswap
…where each different colour is a different partition and | is yoiur 0.25kB MBR and || is your 500MB /boot partition (used by Fedora, not used by all flavours).
When you reinstall a distro, you can use custom partitioning: format the /boot (if used) and / partitions and mount them as before, but mount the /home partition without formatting. That should preserve all your data on the /home partition.
You still have all sorts of updating and installation of things like vlc flash and opera to do.

[Joe Ess]

Richard Tookey wrote:I no longer even think about directly updating my Ubuntu systems to the latest version since only once has it worked successfully so I end up having to re-install everything anyway!

I got into this habit long ago with Windows machines. Performance seemed to decline gradually over a year or so and I'd end up wiping it and reinstalling. Then I had a Ubuntu update go bad leaving me with a borked system and started doing the same thing with Linux.

Campbell Ritchie wrote:
You partition your disc rather like this... That should preserve all your data on the /home partition.

I do the same thing. I also keep a backup of my data, but I don't bother to backup the OS or programs.

[Campbell Ritchie]

There is no point in backing up the programs or OS; you can download them so easily.
I had more problems with F18, and Ruth complained too, so I now have one PC back on F17. I have also installed the MATE (pronounced mahtay after the Spanish tea) desktop and all the annoyances of Gnome3 are vanishing.

[Peter Johnson]

I gave up running upgrades on Linux years ago, both Fedora and Ubuntu tended to make the system unusable afterwards. I make sure my data is backed up, wipe the partition, install from scratch, and restore my data (though most of my data tends to be on a separate partition anyway). The only issue I usually run into is that I forget to backup configuration files that are in /etc or other locations. Then I have to redo the configs by hand, at which point I copy the config file(s) into a config directory in my home directory so that they get backed up next time. I think that next time* I will allocate two partitions for Linux and alternate between them when installing the new version. Then I'll have the old partition available for a while which will come in handy when I realize I'm missing some config files. (I already do this for my Linux VMs - I just create a new one for the new version and after a few months delete the old one; by then I have everything I need copied off of the old one.)

* The hard drive hosting the Linux partition is on its last legs so one of these days when I get around to replacing it I'll partition accordingly.

[Pat Farrell]

Yeah, auto-updates, especially to "new" releases, is a big deal. One of the reasons that I decided that I couldn't stand Ubuntu anymore, they keep releasing new versions every six months. I like the Debian philosophy, where they move slowly and go years between major releases.

I tried to try Linux Mint a while back, and they have so many different versions that are "current" that I never could figure out which one I wanted to try.

I have blissfully stayed unaware of the whole Gnome vs KDE vs Unity vs XYZ theological wars. I don't care about fancy capabilities of a window manager, all I want is a nice window manager so I can copy/cut/paste text from one screen to the next. Is that so hard?

[Campbell Ritchie]

I am not convinced fedup is much better than it was last Winter. I have had no end of difficulty getting it to work. You would have thought they could have got it sorted by now.
I also read somewhere that you should have /tmp and /var partitions mounted. So I tried it. that was disastrous, too.

[Jelle Klap]

Man, that's f-ed up.

[Joe Ess]

Do you have to use Fedora for some reason? There's plenty of alternatives.

[Campbell Ritchie]

I have finally beaten Fedora into submission. I would have tried OpenSUSE instead if I had not got Fedora to work. I must say, the installation and updating process for Fedora has become much more complicated this last year or so.

[Pat Farrell]

Campbell Ritchie wrote: I must say, the installation and updating process for Fedora has become much more complicated this last year or so.

That is sad news. One of the things that drove me to Debian from RedHat was the complexity of RPM hell.

[Gary Marshall]

All:

Ok, I'm a linux / Fedora noob, and I wholeheartedly admit it. I've been told a few times by linux seniors about not using Root to do stuff with and I've been behaving myself, but yesterday I got bit.

I downloaded Tomcat 7 on my System 76 machine that has Fedora 19 installed. The tar.gz was placed in the Downloads folder. I found a good website that walked me through the installation process. Using Files I right-clicked the tar.gz and click "move to": and selected the "/usr/share" directory and I got the "Error opening file '/usr/share/apache-tomcat-7.0.42.tar.gz': Permission denied" message indicating I did not have the privilege to do this, which kinda sucks, since it is my own personal machine. I lord over this thing and to tell me I can't do something is...welll blasphemous. As an experienced windows user I'm getting really bent up at this OS which keeps refusing to do silly simple things I want done within Files, like I do when I use file explorer in windows like, for example, move a file from one folder to another.

So, in order to get around this nonsense I did a CHMOD 777 on the /usr folder. Yeah I know what your thinking. "You dumb a**!" And your right. As I stated I'm a noob and my ignorance bit me. See by doing the CHMOD 777 on the /usr folder I hosed up the sudo utility and it rendered my password for my root user useless, which meant I could no longer do a lot of stuff, which meant my OS was also practically useless.

OK, so noob mistake. I copied selected folders of data off to an external hard drive and reinstalled the OS. I had my data on a different drive than the fedora install but I see that I have to install all of the software that I use ie: java, tomcat, mysql, intelliJ, etc, etc.

So I tell you all this in order to ask this question: Is this the way it works with linux / Fedora? If I screw up and render the OS useless to the point that I have to reinstall the OS does that mean I will also have to reinstall all of the software I use? Is there a way to avoid reinstall all of the software one uses when a reinstalll of the OS is required?

Thank you for your time.
Gary

[Pat Farrell]

All rules are meant to be broken on occasion.

All linux/unix systems expect to be administered by a person who uses root (or really 'su') periodically. The warning is overstated. What they want is to break the Windows karma where naive users run root/admin all the time without knowing it.

I have debian machines that stay up for over a year between reboots, and have been running for five or more years. But there is a learning curve.

[Campbell Ritchie]

You should have navigated to the directory

cd /usr/share

then unzipped the file with temporary login as su

sudo tar -zxvf ~/Downloads/tomcat7.0.42.tar.gz

Or similar.
The system will ask for your password (assuming you are on the list for sudo), and you will be admin for that particular instruction only. The password remains active for a few minutes, so you can use sudo several times without entering a password.

[Tim Holloway]

The reason for the problem is the very same reason that Windows has historically been a cesspool of infection and Linux has not. Windows expected that in many cases, the user "owned" the machine from bottom to top and could act accordingly. Too often, the real owner of the machine was malware.

Since about Windows 7, Microsoft has been closing the security holes and you'll see that in how it handles installations done with the Windows MSI installer, where you will frequently be prompted for an administrator (root) password. Windows is basically doing its GUI version of the "sudo" command. Modern versions of Linux will do much the same thing (actually have for much longer) in cases where, for example, you download a system package via your web browser.

For components not packaged for installation via the OS installer, you're on your own regardless of OS. You have to manually acquire root privileges via su or sudo in order to update OS directories, just as Windows will harass you about opening up the Windows System directories.

One thing to bear in mind also is that Tomcat is a server, not a stand-alone application, which makes it more like a Windows service than a Windows app. In fact, there's some extra stuff that specifically goes with Tomcat for Windows that makes it run as a Windows Service. This isn't needed for Linux, since Linux doesn't consider services to be that different from regular apps.

For personal use, it's probably better to install Tomcat as a subdirectory of your home directory so that you have full access rights. That way you don't need root privileges at all.

For use as an actual server, the best thing to do is create a Tomcat userid, install Tomcat in a generally visible directory (I prefer /usr/local), chown the Tomcat server to be owned by the Tomcat user, and start/stop tomcat using that userId. You can add your userID to the tomcat security group to avoid having to switch identities every time you want to redeploy a webapp.

[E Armitage]

The only thing I keep in my linux home folder is my .profile which sets some shortcuts and variables. All other data and some programs go into a data partition which I can access from both windows and linux.
I moved from Fedora when Mint 9 was released. It's not too much better when it comes to hardware support though. One of my HP laptops for example starts linux with the brightness turned down all the way while the same distro works fine on the Dell.

[Anayonkar Shivalkar]

Looks like its not only me then

I used to use Fedora some time back (Fedora 4 through 6). However, with Fedora 6, they made a change so that I was unable to open the software manager if my machine is not connected to internet. And I didn't have internet at that time. And of course, I was pretty upset about those rpm dependency (I had to make 3 trips to internet cafe just to resolve dependencies of rpm of vlc player )

So, I just started using Debian 4 (which came free with an issue of magazine at that time). It was having 3 DVDs - the number of package was so huge that I never had to go to internet cafe, plus, legendary synaptic manager was so amazing at resolving dependencies that I really liked it.

I've been using Debian based distros since then (typically Debian, then Ubuntu and now Mint).

E Armitage wrote:The only thing I keep in my linux home folder is my .profile which sets some shortcuts and variables. All other data and some programs go into a data partition which I can access from both windows and linux.

This is fine. Just make sure that you do not delete any config files from that partition. However, even if you face any issue, a package re-install should fix the issue.

E Armitage wrote:I moved from Fedora when Mint 9 was released. It's not too much better when it comes to hardware support though. One of my HP laptops for example starts linux with the brightness turned down all the way while the same distro works fine on the Dell.

Yes, its a pity why Debian based distros (I don't know what is status of RedHat based distros) are not able to fix this issue till date. I've seen this issue consistently during last 2 years and every time I have to apply same old workaround:

Currently, on my laptop (Dell) desktop brightness is always full. Even if I change it, it again goes to full after restart. I'm applying below WA for it:
1) Give full access to file /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness (actual file may vary based on distro/laptop)
2) Put below line in /etc/rc.local file:

echo -n 0 > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness

However, please note that here, '0' means least brightness. Currently, on my machine, brightness values are from 0 (lowest) to 15 (highest). You may need to adjust actual value as per your choice.

Surprisingly, with actual desktop, I never had such issue (even with old versions of Ubuntu and Mint).

[Campbell Ritchie]

The newest version seems no better. I tried to update to F20β a couple of weeks ago, and fedup dutifully upgraded me from F19 to F19.
Now that F20 is officially available, I still can't get it to work. And when I googled for the error, it appears lots of other people had the same problem. I'll try an update from a DVD, failing which I might change to OpenSUSE.

[Campbell Ritchie]

You can't seem to update Fedora from a DVD any more. So, it's openSUSE for me!

[Pat Farrell]

Campbell Ritchie wrote:You can't seem to update Fedora from a DVD any more. So, it's openSUSE for me!

Have you considered pure Debian? I love it, IMHO, YMMV, etc.

[Campbell Ritchie]

If I'm going to use Debian, I shall use its Ubuntu version. But that entails Unity

[Pat Farrell]

Campbell Ritchie wrote:If I'm going to use Debian, I shall use its Ubuntu version. But that entails Unity

I hate Unity.

I would not call Ubuntu that close to Debian. Like a majority of Linux distros, Ubuntu is based on Debian, but they march to their own drummer. Lots of stuff gets changed. Lots more than I like.

I run pure Debian on all of my servers. I run Linux Mint on my Linux laptop changed maybe 8 months ago after nearly a decade of constant Ubuntu use.

I have run OpenSuse, and it doesn't match my preferences.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Thank you, but I have used SUSE before and been happy with it.

[Tim Cooke]

Campbell, if you're veering towards Ubuntu but dread the thought of Unity then might i suggest you try xubuntu. you'll get all the pleasantries of Ubuntu but with the XFCE window manager. Much lighter and without all the fancy pants ui polish. Think gnome 2.

[Anayonkar Shivalkar]

Totally agree with Tim.

IMHO, Unity is not that bad desktop env - it is just different than others, and takes some time to get habitual with - but that's just me.

However, I left Ubuntu because of their privacy stuff (integrating searches with online services like Amazon, YouTube etc.). Is it only Unity specific? If yes, then Xubuntu (XFCE), Lubuntu(LXDE) or Kubuntu (KDE) would be better option than Ubuntu.

But then, (though I haven't used OpenSuse or any RedHat based distro in long time), I think I can understand why Campbell is not very inclined towards Debian family. It is not easy to switch 'families' - e.g. I'll switch from Mint to Ubuntu to Debian etc. but it'll be difficult for me to switch to Fedora or OpenSuse.

Also, I've heard that latest version of OpenSuse(13.1) is getting quite positive reviews, and it is common to find Fedora users switching to OpenSuse

[chris webster]

+1 for Linux Mint. All the ease of use of Ubuntu/Debian with none of the privacy issues. You can choose from various desktops, but no Unity bloatware. Only thing you have to watch out for is that it's not as easy to upgrade from one version to another as Ubuntu. Which is of course where we came in...

[Tim Holloway]

For anyone concerned, a new fedup just came in with my morning updates.

I haven't attempted upgrading yet, though. Still at F18.

[Pat Farrell]

One of the reasons I love Debian on my servers is that they don't update its features very often, maybe once every three or four years. Security and bug patches, sure, but the basic OS stays the same.

I'm tempted to run it on my laptop, I hate change.

[Tim Holloway]

RHEL/CentOS are also "slow change" products. I think the timeline is a new major release every 2 years. The target audience is the Enterprise, where "latest and greatest" often fall secondary to "set it and foget it".

Fedora is the proving ground for features that - if successful - will make it into future releases of Red Hat (where appropriate).

From a practical standpoint, you'd prefer RHEL (paid support), CentOS (same thing, free) or SuSe for production servers and other systems with enterprise features (SANs, fail-soft/fail-safe/HE). Fedora is the Red Hat "consumer" equivalent on the fast-change schedule.

Debian is less targeted towards the Enterprise, and more towards personal use, although Debian is used by a lot of local companies as well. Debian actually allows mixing levels, so that you can have a stable base system while still pulling experimental or fast-change components from its alternative versions. Ubuntu started out (like Knoppix) as a more user-friendly spinoff of Debian with a faster upgrade path, but they have made attempts on the Enterprise with their LTS (Long-Term Support) releases and pulls from the Red Hat Enterprise toolkits that Debian mostly passed over. The results of this cross-distro integration are sometimes spotty. And, of course, Ubuntu's attempts to be its own little commercial NSA haven't made a lot of people happy.

Then we have the really insane people who build it all from scratch using Gentoo. Few businesses can spare the time to mess with that approach (although I know someone locally).

[Tim Holloway]

Status update.

Fedora 18 goes end-of-life in about a week. Also, my copy had taken to spontaneous reboot without warning lately, so I bit the bullet and ran fedup.

Fedup complained about various things, but they were stuff I was willing to risk, considering the alternatives, so I went ahead.

The install process blacked out my screen midway through. No re-awakening it was possible. I knew the machine was busy, because the disk light was on pretty much solid. However, "busy" and "productive" are not synonymous, no matter what management thinks, and after an hour or so, I ended up killing it. When I rebooted, what I had was a horrible bastard mashup between F18 and F20. The system menu showed a lot of duplicate icons.

Decided to make a clean break and booted up a live DVD. Their new disk customization system isn't nearly as intuitive as they think it is and it's in keeping with the general trend these days to remove critical functionality just because they think they've made things simpler. It also doesn't tell you if you haven't defined a boot partition - just emits a cryptic message and won't let you proceed.

Finally got the OS installed, but I'd gone on to other things. Came back and the screen was locked. All I knew what that a set of chevrons kept fading in and out. Couldn't get the menubar options to do anything, clicking right and left buttons on the screen didn't help. I finally figured out that they wanted me to "pull up" the screen, a la phone/tablet. I haven't worked with pull-up screens since my Amiga days and I don't consider it intuitive on a desktop mouse system as a screen unlock.

I got into numerous fights over things like setting up LDAP authentication, and darned if even a clean install didn't give me duplicate menus. The new Gnome3 is an improvement over the original, but not so much that I didn't soon install Cinnamon again.

In short, disappointing. Older releases might not have been as shiny, but rarely have I had as much trouble installing.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Those chevrons are something to do with the screensaver.

[Campbell Ritchie]

They have really shot themselves in the foot with fedup, haven't they?

[Tim Holloway]

Campbell Ritchie wrote:Those chevrons are something to do with the screensaver.

They're a hint to slide it up.

Which is pretty natural on a tablet. Just not on a desktop. They could at least have dropped a tooltip. A lot of tablets do that much.

[Campbell Ritchie]

It would appear you are supposed to install a repository with the keys in: look at this fedoraproject forum thread.
It seems to be as follows:-

To me, sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-20 seems to have solved the problem.

[Tim Holloway]

I'm still annoyed. When I hibernate and power back on, I get a blue screen with a Fedora logo on it and that's it. I can move the mouse pointer around, but no mouse or keys will unlock it.

ALT+SHIFT+F2 will bop me over to one of the command prompt virtual terminals, but the only thing I can do there is run command-line commands. Including shutdown -r to throw away the hibernated gui session and reboot the whole machine.