The stickyness of Fedora 8 (despite my better intentions)

May 28, 2011

Pete Zaitcev:

[...] - I wanted to bash CKS for [still running] Fedora EIGHT, but then my wife has *XP* on netbook...

Yes, it's true, I'm still running Fedora 8 on my home machine. It's clearly reaching the edges of viability; I live in fear of the day when some sufficiently important precompiled binary package stops working because it needs, eg, a more recent version of the core C++ ABI.

(This has happened with both Firefox 4 and Google Chrome for exactly that reason. Fortunately they are not quite sufficiently important.)

I'd like to say that I have good reasons for staying on Fedora 8, but the truth is that it has just been too much work when the existing solution limps along (and I've had distractions). In the best case I'm looking at a solid day's work to put my machine back together, and I always have something better to do with that time. I'd like to be upgraded, but I dread going through the process of upgrading.

In theory the rational thing to do at this point is to buy a modern machine where all the pieces actually work (however annoying that is), install the current Fedora on it, and copy over all of my data (although this still leaves the work of reapplying all of my machine customizations, which is not something that I'm really looking forward to). In practice, one of the issues is that my Fedora install is a very old one and is thus carrying around a number of old shared library RPMs that aren't in any modern Fedora. I was going to say that I wasn't looking forward to finding out what programs required them and then where I could find the ancient RPMs, but it turns out that I think I have local copies of everything that might matter, and some of the other ancient RPMs are likely not functional any more anyways.

(For example, in news that will probably horrify Pete Zaitcev even more, I discovered that I had an ld.so RPM installed. This is the dynamic linker for libc5-based programs, and mine dates from 2000. While I do have a libc5-based binary or two still lying around, I don't have the actual libc.so.5 shared library so those binaries can't have run for years. Whether they would run even with a libc.so.5 is an open question; I suspect that the answer is 'no'.)

Of course, the next question is what customizations I've done to my home machine's setup. In theory as a wise sysadmin I should have nice notes and instructions. In practice, well, I was in a rush at the time, or at least that's my excuse. Next time for sure.

PS: in the original entry I talked about going straight from Fedora 8 to Fedora 13 via the Fedora 13 CD. As it turns out, that doesn't work; I believe that PreUpgrade is being entirely accurate when it told me that I could only go to Fedora 10. So that would be at least three full upgrade steps (8 to 10, 10 to 12, and then 12 to 14 followed sometime with a 14 to 15 upgrade via yum).

You know, that crazy upgrade scheme is looking more and more attractive all the time.


Comments on this page:

From 24.16.25.111 at 2011-05-28 04:36:01:

The idea that we ought to have to update OSes every N years is a terrible one, for any small value of N.

I guess people espouse this point of view not because they think it's good, but because it's necessary, but it often comes across as if they don't think it's a big deal, that they don't have any problem with this being the way things are... which is crazy.

(Still running XP. Still compiling C programs with MSVC 6 from 1997.)

--nothings

From 201.93.229.28 at 2011-05-28 09:37:25:

If you're so paranoid about stability in Linux (which is paradoxical), why don't you install CentOS which has a much longer life time?

There is no hope for you to upgrade Fedora 8, unless you want to do it package by package manually editing files and messing with your systems.

Now that Fedora 15 is out, Fedora 13 is the only thing supported and won't be for very long either. Besides, how many unpatched security flaws do you have in Fedora 8 right now? And if you don't, how much time is it costing you to keep it secure?

By cks at 2011-05-30 10:45:10:

As far as I know, it's still possible to upgrade a Fedora 8 machine in stages; the DVD images (and updates repositories and so on) are still available for intermediate versions, and probably will be for years. Fedora end-of-support just means no more (security) updates, it doesn't mean that the infrastructure goes away.

I prefer Fedora to CentOS when I can keep it up to date, and besides there is no upgrade path from CentOS release to CentOS release; you get to reinstall from scratch. Whereas it is at least possible to keep upgrading a Fedora machine for years, and I have in fact done it. My office workstation is running Fedora 14, but it was installed with Fedora 6 or so (just as my home machine was).

The security issues are complicated but I feel that I am not particularly vulnerable on my home machine, which is relatively locked down and inaccessible.

From 216.93.205.25 at 2011-05-31 10:22:39:

Someday soon I'll be faced with upgrading from ancient Slack 12.2 to something else - haven't settled on what that is yet - to something that will likely have the newest KDE or Gnome. (Probably that will push me into the fvwm camp where I probably belong). This time I swear by all that's binary that I will have a scripted solution to install and configure all the myriad tweaks that my current system is embued with. There are a few bright spots: all my local installs have a copy of the tarball/package all under one master directory; all the build directories too; and most everything lives in /usr/local except those few damned packages that thought installing in /opt would make sense (Or*cle, e.g.).
--
Charles Polisher

By cks at 2011-05-31 23:34:52:

I admit that I sometimes toy with the idea of a one-machine Puppet or Chef setup for exactly this reason. (There are a number of obstacles between this and practicality.)

From 84.203.137.218 at 2011-06-07 10:43:15:

I've used F8, F11, F14 all chosen for sufficiently high stability:shininess ratio. F8 was really good. F14 after updates are applied is also very good. I'm now using F15 with my new sandy bridge laptop. I knew it was going to be unstable and I wasn't disappointed. Hard hangs at least once a day. I documented various pain points for each at:

http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/f8.html
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/f11.html
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/f14.html
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/f15.html

Written on 28 May 2011.
« You can get 'stale filehandle' errors for local files on extN filesystems
Getting the stages of the class namespace straight »

Page tools: View Source, View Normal, Add Comment.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Comments.

Last modified: Sat May 28 00:19:14 2011
This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.