An important lesson for me on Fedora upgrades

November 24, 2009

As I mentioned in a recent entry, Flash has been broken for me for all of Fedora 11 on my 64-bit machine. The comments on my entry caused me to dig into the situation, and after some experimentation (building a fresh installed 64-bit Fedora 11 in a virtual machine to see if Flash worked, which it did), I found my problem and now have working Flash.

In fact, I found the problem doing what I should have done in the first place; I ran 'package-cleanup --problems', which reported that I had a libflashsupport RPM (in both 64-bit and 32-bit versions) that had unmet dependencies on specific versions of libcrypto.so.6 and libssl.so.6. Removing the libflashsupport RPMs unsurprisingly made Flash work again.

(libflashsupport seems to come from Fedora 8. package-cleanup comes from yum-utils, which I think everyone should have installed.)

I think it's time that I ran all of package-cleanup's tests to make sure my machine is relatively clean. In fact, I should make a habit of doing this after every Fedora upgrade that I do, because upgrading can easily leave you with exactly this sort of problems.

(Note that not all of what package-cleanup complains about is a genuine problem, especially for its --orphans option.)


Comments on this page:

From 69.134.205.142 at 2009-11-24 15:27:18:

Is it ever appropriate to have earlier distribution packages installed in one's system? I just updated to fc-12, I've got about a dozen fc-11 packages left, and yum claims they're more recent than the fc-12 versions :-\

By cks at 2009-11-24 16:02:36:

Not all packages get rebuilt between Fedora versions; there are some .fc10 packages in a valid Fedora 11 install, for example. However, packages not in the current version's repository are a danger sign; see here for one way that they can happen.

(See 'package-cleanup --orphans' for a list of such orphan packages on your system.)

If the packages are still working, I wouldn't worry about it for now. New Fedora 12 updates will come out soon enough and replace them.

Written on 24 November 2009.
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