Tag Archives: dnf

Fedora 24 upgrade

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Fedora 24 was released last week, so of course I had to upgrade my machines. As has become the norm, there weren’t any serious issues, but I hit a few annoyances this time around. The first was due to packages in the RPMFusion repos not being signed. This isn’t Fedora’s fault, as RPMFusion is a completely separate project. And it was temporary: by the time I upgraded my laptop on Sunday night, the packages had all been signed.

Several packages had to be dropped by using the –allowerasing argument to dnf. Mostly these were packages installed from RPMFusion, but there were a couple of Fedora packages as well.

The biggest annoyance was that post-upgrade, I had no graphical login. I had to explicitly start the desktop manager service with:

systemctl enable kdm
systemctl start kdm

kdm had previously been enabled on both machines, but the upgrade nuked that in both cases. It looks like I’m not the only person to hit this: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1337546

And now, my traditional meaningless torrent stats!

Here’s my seeding ratios for Fedora 23:

Flavor i686 x86_64
KDE 16.2 35.6
Security 10.3 21.1
Workstation 30.9 46.7
Server 17.5 25.0

The “ratio ratio” as I call it is a comparison of seeding ratios between the two main architectures:

Flavor x86_64:i686
KDE 2.20
Security 2.05
Workstation 1.51
Server 1.43

So what does all of this tell us? Nothing, of course. Just because someone downloads a torrent that doesn’t mean they use it. Still, if we pretend that it’s a proxy for usage, all of the seeding ratios are higher than on the last release day. That tells me that Fedora is becoming more popular (yay!). 64-bit architectures are continuing to be a larger portion of the pie, as well.

Now that I’m starting to build a record of these, I can start reporting trends with the Fedora 25 release.

Upgrading to Fedora 23 and some meaningless torrent stats

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Since Fedora 23 was released yesterday, I went ahead and upgraded my desktop over lunch. The process was mostly painless. I followed the instructions for using dnf in Fedora Magazine, but hit a small snag: a few of the packages blocked on requirements. So I removed an old kernel-devel package and gstreamer-plugins-ugly. But I still got this:

package kf5-kdesu-5.15.0-2.fc23.x86_64 requires kf5-filesystem >= 5.15.0, but none of the providers can be installed.

That’s not great, because you can’t remove that package without also removing KDE Plasma. Taking the –best off of the dnf invocation fixed it, without any weird upgrade issues (the –best option supposedly cancels the download if a package can’t be upgraded, but everything seems good after the fact).

Since I don’t have any great tales of technical prowess to share, I thought I’d comment on the torrents. Measuring usage of an open source operating system is a really tricky thing, so I thought I might see what the torrents tell us. Keep in mind that torrents are probably a terrible way of measuring popularity, too. I’m just going to assume that most people who torrent ISOs are only torrenting the ones they actually use (instead of me, where I torrent several just to be a good citizen).

Here’s my seeding ratios for Fedora 22:

Flavor i686 x86_64
KDE 16.1 32.9
Security 8.02 13.6
Workstation 24.8 31.2
Server 10.3 15

The “ratio ratio” as I call it is a comparison of seeding ratios between the two main architectures:

Flavor x86_64:i686
KDE 2.04
Security 1.70
Workstation 1.26
Server 1.46

So what does all of this tell us? Apart from “absolutely nothing!”, it says that KDE users install on x86_64 way more than on i686. Workstation is still really popular on 32-bit machines and overall. The first 32 hours of seeding for Fedora 23 show similar patterns. Yay?

Using tracer to point out service restart needs

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If you’re seeing this via Fedora Planet, you probably saw Miroslav Suchý’s post from a few days ago about a project called Tracer. Tracer is a friendly tool to tell you what outdated services are running. With the dnf plugin installed, you get a list at the end of the upgrade process.

For example, right after I installed the plugin and ran an upgrade, I was told that I needed to restart the Samba service. In addition, there were several programs that needed to be manually restarted (KeePassX and Spider Oak, to name two). Plus, one process required a logout, and one required a full system reboot.

I’ve found this to be pretty useful, since I don’t always realize what services need to be restarted after package updates. I have a decade of system administration experience, so it’s not too bad for me. For others, this is a great way to shine light on exactly what needs to be restarted and how.