[Yum] Correction and minor barf...

Robert G. Brown rgb at phy.duke.edu
Wed Jun 19 12:22:02 UTC 2002


On 19 Jun 2002, seth vidal wrote:

> 1. stop using lilo ;)

Oh, I did, and am.  In fact, getting the system to boot again I learned
how to drive grub at the command line (determining along the way that
here is yet another package that has documentation from hell).  

I just have a small string of systems in various states of legacy
because two or three of them are/were being used as specialized servers
(requiring custom built stuff that were a LOT of work to get working,
originally).  They were inside a firewall, safe, and unused except for
totally boring beowulfish stuff and print serving, so why invest energy
in upgrading?

Now the HP officejet stuff is in 7.3 -- no incentive at all to keeping
them behind just to preserve a setup (however much of a bitch it was to
hack ghostscript and the new printer database system the first time).
I'm crossing my fingers that I can reinstall printer and scanner drivers
in five notes.

The system in question was sufficiently munged by all my hacking that I
had to do a full reinstall anyway.  Both yup and yum barfed "instantly"
with a python error.  Not a big deal.

> 2. the lilo stuff is stolen from up2date - chances are your lilo.conf
> was munged or odd, or something was not available in it that should be.
>  (did you rpm -e a kernel that you didn't remove from the lilo.conf?)

Sigh.  Of course -- the mkinitrd kernel 2.4.3 conflict.  I actually did
have a clue and installed grub before rebooting, but I didn't get the
methodology right the first time -- install on /dev/hda (to replace
lilo in the MBR) plus the (hd0,[0,1,2...]) notation.  I basically
installed it on the wrong partition and got stuck in lilo.

This isn't a bug in yum, I know, EXCEPT insofar as you try (if you try)
to write an upgrade option that manages e.g. the kernel/mkinitrd
conflict.  It will either need a bit of smarts to correctly patch
lilo.conf (risky, obviously) or it will need a helpful little message
like: "Remove kernel XXX from lilo.conf and rerun lilo or install and
configure grub" or it will need to steal the grub/lilo sequence from the
regular RH upgrade/install, if possible.  So it is a line on a possible
feature.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu






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