James Oguya

Linux nuggets

Upgrading Fedora 22 to 23 using DNF

Posted on
#fedora #linux

This is a short & simple guide for upgrading Fedora 22 to Fedora 23 using DNF

Live Fedora upgrades using dnf or yum usually works well with typical installations but that doesn’t mean you won’t experience errors during the process. In this guide, I’ll break the entire process into 3 stages:

  • Pre-upgrade
  • Upgrade
  • Post-upgrade

Pre-upgrade

  • Backup your Data:
    Backup all your important data before doing anything. It’s always a good idea to have backups which you can fallback to incase something goes utterly wrong the upgrade.

  • Run updates & reboot:
    Upgrade your Fedora 22 packages & reboot before you can start the upgrade, just to make sure you’re running the latest kernel & other packages.

    # dnf upgrade
# systemctl reboot

Upgrade

  • Import Fedora 23 GPG Key, clean dnf local cache & finally start the upgrade.

    # rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-23-$(uname -i)
# dnf upgrade
# dnf clean all
# dnf --releasever=23 --setopt=deltarpm=false distro-sync

Post-Upgrade

  • After the upgrade, invoke SELinux to autorelabel all files/dirs and finally reboot. Autorelabling will occur during the next boot process.

    # touch /.autorelabel
# systemctl reboot

Gotchas!!!

  • During the upgrade I bumped into a couple of errors related to missing dependencies.

    # dnf --releasever=23 --setopt=deltarpm=false distro-sync
Last metadata expiration check performed 0:27:00 ago on Wed Dec  2 10:19:02 2015.
Error: package rubygem-celluloid-0.15.2-2.fc22.noarch requires rubygem(timers) < 1.2, but none of the providers can be installed
package libxml2-python-2.9.3-1.fc22.x86_64 requires libxml2 = 2.9.3-1.fc22, but none of the providers can be installed
(try to add '--allowerasing' to command line to replace conflicting packages)

  • Since both package dependencies were available on Fedora 23 repo, I switched to that repo & upgraded them before running the upgrade process again. I think this is not the recommended way of fixing such issues, but it worked!

    # dnf --releasever=23 install --best --allowerasing rubygem-timers libxml2

  • Another thing to note is that DNF upgrades are heavily dependent on your network. So it’s always a good idea to use local mirrors to speed up the upgrade process.