Hi All,

I'm new to preupgrade and playing with Fedora test builds (alpha, beta, TC, RC or otherwise), but hardly new to Fedora.  I'm hoping to do some early testing of F18 before it's released so I've built myself a F17 VM, fully updated it and have started the whole preupgrade process.  I think I've run into a bug or two, but ... as I said, I'm new to this.

I've got a local mirror of development/{18,rawhide} due to a mandated proxy and in general, the wish to reinstall fast many times, if needed.  I'm attempting preupgrade via ssh since I did a minimal install of F17 and have no X server installed on the VM.  

Issue #1:
According to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Branched#Upgrade_from_any_previous_release_via_Preupgrade_and_Anaconda, I should be able to select "Fedora 18 (Branched)".  Maybe that would work, maybe not.  For my first few attempts preupgrade just hung:

preupgrade-cli -d5 -v "Fedora 18 (Branched)"
Loaded plugins: blacklist, whiteout
No plugin match for: rpm-warm-cache
No plugin match for: remove-with-leaves
No plugin match for: auto-update-debuginfo
No plugin match for: refresh-packagekit
No plugin match for: presto
Not loading "blacklist" plugin, as it is disabled
Not loading "whiteout" plugin, as it is disabled
Config time: 0.007
^C^C
Exiting.

A debug message here would have been helpful.  Admittedly, I did not trying higher debug levels -- I didn't see any ranges documented so it just seemed a time waste to blindly poke around.  Figuring that I was waiting for a network timeout, I interrupted it and did some more reading about how to use a local mirror from here: http://oliver.net.au/?p=188.  I grabbed a copy of http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/releases.txt and didn't see any mention of "Fedora 18 (Branched)" as indicated on the Wiki.  I edited this copy to include my own  "Fedora 18 (Branched)" section that referenced my local mirror and then got much further.


Issue #2:
preupgrade got busy doing lots of stuff that looked reasonable, but then ended thusly:

Preparing system to boot into installer
DEBUG /sbin/grubby --title="Upgrade to Fedora 18 (Branched)" --remove-kernel="/boot/upgrade/vmlinuz" --add-kernel="/boot/upgrade/vmlinuz" --initrd="/boot/upgrade/initrd.img" --args="preupgrade repo=hd::/var/cache/yum/preupgrade  ks=hd:UUID=6ed39ed0-5dab-472b-8aa0-e0c42e3264d6:/upgrade/ks.cfg stage2=hd:UUID=6ed39ed0-5dab-472b-8aa0-e0c42e3264d6:/upgrade/squashfs.img ksdevice=link"
sh: /sbin/grub: No such file or directory
/bin/echo: write error: Broken pipe
All finished. The upgrade will begin when you reboot.

Once the upgrade starts, a VNC server will open on port 5901.
Use it to monitor progress or fix problems that may arise.

Are those errors to be expected?


Issue #3:
I rebooted the VM, saw the new "Fedora 18 (Branched)" choice in grub's menu, but it was not the default and so the system booted back into F17.  Since I have a console to the VM, I can "assist" it along, but I suspect that shouldn't be required, right?
--
John Florian
Machine Data Collections Team