How to Upgrade
Fermi Linux 7.3.x to the latest Scientific Linux Fermi LTS 3.0.x
via yum

ATTENTION ATTENTION ATTENTION

These instructions should be run by an *experienced* linux system administrator. These instructions are not magic, there will be problems. But an experienced linux system administrator should be able to recognize the problems, and deal with them in the proper fasion.
If you do have problems that you feel are not unique to your system, please let the page maintainer (Troy Dawson) know, so that he can update the web page.

Updated September 22, 2005
If you find steps that need to be added or changed, please contact Troy at dawson@fnal.gov

Pre Requisites
1: The file /etc/fermi-release must contain at least "Fermi Linux Release 7.3". It can contain more than that, such as "Fermi Linux Release 7.3.1 (Bottom)". But if it does not have this in it, or the file doesn't exit, you cannot do this procedure.
2: If your current /etc/yum.conf has entries other than [main], [server], [updates], [yum], and those entries are not pointing to linux.fnal.gov, or linux1.fnal.gov, you cannot do this procedure. An example is if you have a [rpmbone] or [atrpms] sections in your yum.conf. Or you have changed [updates] to point to download.fedora.com. Or your yum.conf is something completely different, like from pure fedora.

Side Notes
1:If you are using some type of custom code on the machine you want to upgrade, make sure that you check to make sure it run's on LTS before you switch your entire machine over. LTS uses possix threading, while 7.3.x did not. This can occasionally make some programs not work, or work differently than they did previously.
2:The upgrades work much better for servers than for desktops. This is because it is mainly the desktop packages that got renamed, and/or changed to something different. While these steps will work for a desktop, it is going to be much more painful than upgrading a server that didn't have any type of desktop installed.

Special Steps
Steps marked in purple only have to be done if you have to, if you don't fit what is stated, skip the step.

Basic Steps

1. Back everything up somehow.
2. Make sure you have LOTS of room for /var/cache - 400Meg to 1000Meg should do.
3. yum update yum
4. Only if grubby is not installed:yum install grubby
5. Only if galeon is installed:yum remove galeon
6. Only if KDE is installed:yum remove kde\*
7. Only if GNOME is installed:yum remove gnome\*
8. Only if AFS is installed:/etc/init.d/afs stop ; yum remove openafs\*
9. Update your yum.conf file by doing
   rpm -Uvh ftp://linux.fnal.gov/linux/lts30x/i386/sites/Fermi/misc/RPMS/yum-conf-30x.LTS.noarch.rpm
10. Optional: yum -d0 list nedit
11. yum update glibc\*
12. yum update openssl\*
13. yum upgrade (this will take a while)
    It is possible that this command will not work because of unresolved dependancies If this happens you have a couple choices.
    • Remove the offending rpm's, then try it again. Below is a list of common offending rpms. You may, or may not have them installed, and as such, the yum remove command may remove them, or just tell you that package doesn't exist.
      yum remove ddskk-xemacs
      yum remove xemacs\*
      yum remove foomatic
      yum remove kdby
      yum remove kmidi
      yum remove kpppload
      yum remove licq-kde
      yum remove netscape\*
      yum remove perl-libwww-perl
      yum remove PyQt\*
      yum remove SDL\*
      yum remove timidity++
      yum remove ucd-snmp
      yum remove up2date\*
      You may have other offending rpm's. Here is where you must use your best judgement on whether to remove them or not. You should not remove the packages rpm, python, or yum.
      yum remove (offending rpms)
      And then,
      yum upgrade
    • Do a fresh install.
14. If previous step did not work, do not go beyond this point
15. Double check /etc/lilo.conf and-or /boot/grub/grub.conf. Re-run lilo if you are using it.
    /sbin/lilo
16. Check your e-mail configuration files if you customized them..
    In 7.3.x the email config files are in /etc and in LTS 3.0.x they are in /etc/mail. They do not automatically get moved over.
17. Only if you want KDE installed:yum groupinstall "KDE Desktop Environment"
18. Only if you want GNOME installed:yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment"
19. Only if you want AFS installed:yum groupinstall "Openafs Client"
20. yum clean all
21. Optional: Clean up your old 73x yum cache
    rm -rf /var/cache/yum/73*
22. /sbin/reboot
23. yum install (offending rpms that you still want)
24. Optional: yum list extras
    These are the rpm's that are not part of LTS. This means that they will not automatically get security updates. If you do not need these packages, it is a very good idea to remove them so you don't end up with a security supprise later on down the road. You should use yum to remove the packages, incase there is some interdependancies.
    Some of the common packages that you will find, that can safely be removed are comps, lrzsz, ncftp, reiserfs-utils, and statserial
    yum remove comps lrzsz ncftp reiserfs-utils statserial