Upgrading to Fedora Core 6

I finally got around to upgrading my Dell to Fedora Core 6 using yum. My last attempt failed pretty miserably mainly because of some stupid package dependencies I couldn’t figure out how to resolve (something to do with

, which was kind of what happened in my attempt to upgrade from FC4 to FC5). So instead of dealing with it, I simply shut it up… Here are the steps:

1. me@localhost$

1	rpm -ev fedora-release --nodeps

2. me@localhost$

1	rpm -Uvh [url-to-fc6-release-notes]

3. me@localhost$

1	rpm -Uvh [url-to-fc6-release]

4. me@localhost$

1	yum clean all

5. me@localhost$

1	yum -y update

By step 5, everything should’ve gone flawlessly, except, again, Fedora threw a fit on dependency problems such as

,

and a couple of other packages. Again, instead of dealing with resolving them, I just removed them:

1. me@localhost$

1	yum remove bg5ps

2. …. (repeat step 1 until all problematic dependencies are removed)

Then everything was good. And as it turns out, the new kernel that came with FC6 (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-i686) is capable of handling dual cpu systems, unlike kernels before that where I had to specifically update multi-processor capable kernels (kernel-smp). I wasted about 20 minutes trying to find/update something that never existed!

Finally, after reboot, I got my nice FC6 all up and running. Life was good except now VMWare refuses to launch. So I had to reinstall it because of the new kernel I installed. Unfortunately, VMWare couldn’t locate the new kernel’s c header library (usually installed at

). But it wasn’t there!!! Even though I had the latest kernel, its c header library still could not be found! After some research, I finally was able to resolve that by force installing

and

rpm files:

me@localhost$

1	rpm -Uvh --force [url-to-kernel-rpm-package]

Issue the command above for both the current

1

kernel

and

1	kernel-devel

Once VMWare got its kernel c header library, it was happy. And life was good again….

My next project with that machine is to upgrade its CPUs with a couple of nice Pentium 3 Slot 1 modules at the maximum clock speed the machine can handle (which is at around 1.1Ghz — fast compared to 450mhz I currently have). These types of CPUs are pretty hard to come by because Intel abandoned Slot 1 architecture a long time ago.

Fedora Core 6 upgrade made possible by this discussion thread at fedoraforum.org. VMWare troubleshooting and resolution made possible by this discussion thread on VMWare’s community site and this discussion thread on fedoraforum.org.