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Fedora 11 upgrade notes

Posted in In-between on 11 June 2009 | 5 comments
Tags: fedora, linux, opensource

Fedora 11 Leonidas was released two days ago, and last night, I decided to upgrade from Fedora 10.

I wimped out, however: instead of going the yum route, I used Preupgrade, which is a simplified version of the upgrade process. Preupgrade downloads all the necessary packages for an Anaconda-assisted upgrade. So, after about four hours of downloading the packages, I was finally upgraded to Fedora 11.

Some significant changes from the previous releases are as follows:

• The Presto yum plugin, which uses deltarpms that significantly reduces the amount of data to be downloaded in updating packages.
• F11 boots faster — about 30 seconds less than F10 in my not-so-scientific tests — because the Fedora project managed to identify boot bottlenecks (they removed setroubleshootd, for one).
• Firefox 3.5 now comes bundled with F11, which brings private browsing mode and a faster Javascript engine among other improvements.

I hit some snags, though: Gwibber (0.9.1-2.288bzr.fc11) does not seem to work, so I’m back to using TweetDeck.

I also had an issue with the Citrix ICAClient. Published apps could not be opened using Citrix ICAClient 10. What’s frustrating was that no error messages were being logged. I had to download the .ica file and run through the command line:

$ $ICAROOT/wfica publishedapp.ica
Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset
Error: Aborting: no fontset found

My immediate suspicion was Xorg fonts, but when I checked, I had the necessary packages. I was on version 10, so I thought I might as well upgrade to version 11 of the ICA client. I downloaded the RPM from Citrix, but could not install it because it required OpenMotif 2.3.1.

Now, OpenMotif was removed from Fedora in FC6 due to licensing issues — lesstif was the recommended alternative. However, lesstif did not have the libraries required by ICAClient, so I had to get and install openmotif-2.3.1-1.i386. I also had to install another package dependency (libXp).

I thought my woes were over, but I still got the above errors when lauching the new wfica. Finally, I found the following solution (hooray for collective knowledge!):

• Set SELinux to permissive.
• Change the location of some font directories.

I’m wondering, though, whether the SELinux dependency was valid since I did not see any related logs in /var/log/messages. But, heck, it worked. UPDATE: SELinux is not the culprit — I’ve set it to active after reinstalling the ICAclient, and all that was needed was to move some font.{dir,scale} files, based on the errors in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. (Thanks for the hint, chris!)

I was finally able to use ICAClient…but not quite finished yet. ICAClient complained that I chose not to trust the UTN-USERFirst-Hardware certificate. It was an issue I encountered with the previous version, for which the solution was to export the Mozilla certificate to the ICAClient keystore.

It was smooth-sailing after that.

Read more:

• Chromium on Fedora
• Upgrading to Fedora 12
• Fix for Picasa 3 Linux login problem
• Upgrade, updates
• Ubuntu LTSP reinstall

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