Coders Edge

Nightmare on Upgrade Street

Upgrade to FC24

Fedora 24

Well, I don't worry. Because the file-systems are solid. And I know what I am doing. So, when I got a notice that the FC24 was bold and ready (bold and ready), I said 'what else am I going to do today? Let's give it a shot.'

I'm not quoting myself.

In any case now, with DNF, the commands are terse and easy. DNF is now locked and loaded and ready to go with the upgrade. And it uses the RPM back end. Slow, slow, slow. But I have a lot of fonts.

In any case, a lot of fonts and a bunch of very large games that take a long time to down load. And really, it's mostly the same data. In any case all of this happens before you need to reboot. And after that, well, it's a cake walk to the end of the upgrade.

Even on a notebook computer, becuae I had to pull out my old one, and I loaded fc24 on that. That thing would onlyu boot to an old copy of fc20, not to the fc23 and fc22 kernels. I don't know why. I needed to boot that because when the system booted after the upgrade it was unable to run the system, and that is just a sad effect so I got a prompt: the rescue prompt. Enter in the root password. Easy peasy.

Now, it's been hot here lately. And I was up before the dawn most of the week and hacking away, writing mean things about the Democrat establishment of the current leadership. In any case, so, at my bad boot, I needed to determine what could have gone wrong. I decided that it would be good to relabel the system. And so I did the touch thing with the magic filename (look it up) so that my drives would be relabeled. But before that . . . I found somewhere that said I needed to boot to a less restictive mode of selinux. What were the exact commands? You had best look for it yourself but basically, in grub (the bootloader), at that part of the boot process, one must select to edit the commands that grub will run, and one must then enter in the correct stuff on te right line (which is easy so if you need to do this, I assume you are smart enough to know what the 'kernel boot line' is, and to know about SELinux, the savior of modern computing, and do what ye need to do to allow the system, how ever it got there, to do what it needs to do. Fortunately I had already done the touch-relabel thing (I don't give these details because if you don't know what I'm talking about, get an expert to help you.)

So, after that, the relabel thing went on for quite a while at the next boot. This was hours later, after my meditating and praying for the souls of those who . . . well that's a different subject. It's been a bad news year for undeserviing people getting harmed, and so . . . well, change of topic.

So, after that, it would let me into X, so I could do the ctl-alt-fn thing and get a command shell. And then I needed to run the desktopswitcher, and select Gnome (which was install, and correct, and waiting to go).

Before that it booted me into X and gave me a blank X terminal except for an xclock, which I believe is in my rclocal file (or whatever teh Xwindows start up file is).

The name of the desktop switchtool in FC24 is . . . drum roll which simulates me looking for the name by checking yesterdays history:

history |grep swi

 513  system-switch-displaymanager --help

 514  sudo system-switch-displaymanager --help

 515  man system-switch-displaymanager  

 516  sudo system-switch-displaymanager gdm

 592  history |grep swi

The only way I was able to find that, not through any 'help' that Fedora did, was to navigate, in a shell, to the /sbin/ directory and do as follows:

ls *swi*

and then there it was.

system-switch-displaymanager

In my case I switched to gdm.There are other choices, you can look them up if you need them.

The other things that I did to investigate, at first, was to check to make sure that grub-mkconfig had been issued correctly. That was not the issue. It was an SELinux denial so I needed to relabel, but it wouldn't relabel until it would boot correctly, and after that . . . Linux worked. I still needed to fix the display manager. I read in their documentatin that they are switching from Xwindows to something new, but still will use Gnome. But in my case, I still seem to be using Xwindows.

I've used Xwindows for a very long time. And I can't say that I'll miss it that much, as clunky as it has proven to be, and at this point most of what it was meant to do is done much better with other methods. But I can still remember when I first saw it, it was old then. And you could do things with it, back int he old VAX day, or on old Unix systems, and it would work from place to place on a Unix here, or a Unix there. Unix Unix everywhere.

And the History of it was that when Mcrosuch and all that (lefveraged arbitrage) tried to make everyone pay them forever for already invented things and demanded that even if you weren't running their stuff that you had to had to had to pay them anyway because they were just so special.

The revolt against that was called Linux.

And now it is 2016 and everyone and their brother and sister runs Linux, or uses it and doesn't know it and Microsoft's stuff, from back in 1996, is just a footnote on how NOT to do operating systems. Hurrah, Open Source won.

But the battle never ended. next Chapter the arbitrage kings decide to take over the open source world too: enter the 'android' system which is just a fork of LINUX.

But the world wins with Open Source, really. So if Google wants to fork Linux, that is fine with everyone as long as they don't stop others from still using the old version.

In any case Xwindows might be going away, and whatever is replacing it is worthy of study.

And after all of that, there were still issues with SElinux, and needing to allow some things, and change some contexts. I use the sealert program with su privledges, and it tells me how to enable what needs enabling.

July 27, 2016

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