Fedora 14 was released two weeks ago.  I normally wait a day or two to install to let the mirrors cool down, but that put the target date right before I left for the LISA conference.  Like any good sysadmin, I’m sufficiently paranoid to not upgrade systems right before I leave, even if said system is only my own desktop.  So now that I’m back, I decided today was a good day to upgrade my home desktop.

As in the past, the recommended method was not for me — I opted to go with the Yum-based upgrade.  For Fedora 14, there’s a new feature that significantly reduces the amount of effort involved in live upgrades.  Using the –releasever argument and distro-sync command, it’s now possible to upgrade without having to manually install the updated version RPMs.  As Chris Siebenmann wrote, it can also be used to downgrade components.

I started the process doing what the instructions said, but as always it didn’t go quite perfectly.  After a little while, I noticed that yum was in an infinite loop of upgrades.

--> Running transaction check
--> Processing Dependency: texlive = 2007-51.fc13 for package: texlive-utils-2007-51.fc13.x86_64
--> Processing Dependency: texlive-dvips = 2007-51.fc13 for package: texlive-utils-2007-51.fc13.x86_6
---> Package xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.x86_64 1:260.19.12-1.fc13 set to be erased
---> Package xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64 1:260.19.12-1.fc13 set to be erased
--> Processing Dependency: /usr/bin/dvips for package: openoffice.org-ooolatex-4.0.0-0.7.beta2.fc12.1.noarch
--> Processing Dependency: /usr/bin/texconfig-sys for package: linuxdoc-tools-0.9.66-5.fc13.x86_64
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

I noticed that it seemed to be related to either the nvidia drivers or the LaTeX package, so I opted to remove the drivers first:

yum remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia

That made the loop a bit shorter, but it didn’t quite fix it, so I removed the LaTeX package:

yum remove `rpm -q --whatprovides /usr/bin/latex`

Then yum reported there were a few broken packages it couldn’t fix, so I removed them, too:

yum remove VirtualBox-3.1 perl-MythTV system-config-display python-MythTV

Finally, the upgrade was on its way.  When it finished and grub was installed, I rebooted into a nice, shiny Fedora 14 install.  (Note: to re-install VirtualBox, you’ll need to install the VirtualBox-3.2 package.)