Pun Salad

Apologies to anyone inconvenienced by our extended outages on Friday, but the blog is now coming to you via the latest version of my Linux distribution, Fedora 7.

Fedora 7 came out May 31. And the call of a new version summons me, much like the tantalizing song of the siren tempts the sailor, sometimes with the same results.

But this turned out OK. Random notes follow.

There is a "live CD" of Fedora 7, but you can't upgrade an existing machine from that, as near as I could tell. (I didn't look very hard, and may have missed it.) The full distribution is available on a 3-Gig DVD image only; no more burning of multiple CDs (good), but … oh, right … this machine only has a CD reader.

Well, no problem, or at least not a big one, to those of us with access to other web servers. I uploaded the DVD image, mounted it, set up a symlink to the mount point in the webroot, and voila, we're off to the races. You still need something to boot your target system with, but the DVD contains a couple of smaller images you can copy to a bootable medium, like a CD or USB stick.

Things were going just swell, when I ran into a sudden and serious stumbling block: the upgrade process refused to continue because it believed the swap partition was invalid. ("Press any key to reboot", it said helpfully.)

After much anguish, I recalled the following caveat from the relase notes:

Well, obviously, that wouldn't apply to the swap partition, right? Wrong, it does. (But, in my slight defense, the error message isn't anything as clear as "You need to label your swap partition, dummy.")

But how do you put a label your swap partition, if it doesn't already have one? A few seconds with the Google reveals: you just use the -L option to mkswap:

# mkswap -L SWAP /dev/hda3

And change the appropriate line in your /etc/fstab:

LABEL=SWAP    swap      swap    defaults 0 0

Restart the upgrade, and we are sailing once again. This time, things ran to completion, and—hooray—everything worked right afterwards.

What of the end result, you ask: was it worth it? Ah, you're missing the point. For a sysadmin:

1. the focus is on the journey, not the destination;

2. we're generally pleasantly surprised when anything works at all.

But I'll answer anyway: Fedora 7 is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Many installed packages are in their latest and greatest revisions. (Firefox 2, for example, replaces Firefox 1.5, and that's especially nice.) There's another marginal improvement in font legibility, welcome for my aging eyes. And the undersea-DNA theme from Fedora Core 6 has been replaced with hot air baloons!

But generally, I'm not a professional reviewer, I don't crawl up and down feature lists, and (as noted above), as long as I have a basically-working environment with Perl, a web browser, and terminal windows, I'm pretty satisfied. (And, of course, a working web server for you kind readers.)

Previous adventures of Linux Boy: the Fedora Core 6 Upgrade and the relatively rocky Fedora Core 5 Upgrade.