Fedora 10 Hits An Update Snag

[Mordent 0]

For those who have been wondering about my slight absence from the forum, I've had, to be blunt, a catastrophic meltdown of all things vaguely useful on my PC at the end of the last week. Everything went down the drain, leaving me with no choice other than completely starting from scratch with a new OS installation.

Being at university means my Windows XP discs were back home, so installing Windows is, for now, out of the question. Instead I decided to give this here Linux-malarky a go and, using someone else's computer, got hold of Fedora 10. Installing it was fine (just as an aside, I have the 64 bit version), and didn't take all that long. Over the weekend, however, Fedora released an "update" which is a nasty little piece of work. For almost all extents and purposes, it's a self-defeating thing that makes further updating tricky (Linky). Now, is it just me, or is this the sort of thing that could be a pretty hefty blow to an OS that is used by so many people worldwide?

As of now there are a few temporary workarounds suggested by people on Fedora's forums regarding this issue, but being nigh on forced to use Linux I'm less than happy with tampering with any integral files which could cause some pretty nasty crashes. The way I see it, I'm leaving the issue until those who deal with the "official" updates get around to sorting out the mess, as fun as not having the "easy" way of installing software is.

Just so you know, this isn't a rant at Fedora as such, as overall I'm impressed with the simplicity of it so far, but it certainly is a mite vexing that you need a pretty in-depth understanding of the system to perform any corrective tweaks as suggested by the forum's community. Has anyone else had any issues with Fedora? Anyone else actually use it? Any advice for a Fedora newbie like myself on what to do if something like this happens?

Any and all feedback is appreciated!

[Animator 0]

This is normal.

 

It's an entire OS, so there are loads of bugs and conflicts to find... some remain undiscovered for years. Even when a bug is reported, most users are blissfully unaware as future updates fix the problem before they notice.

 

One this for sure... you will never ever ever ever ever see such things go wrong with Microsoft. I guarantee it.

 

Why? Well it's simple.

Linux is Open Source and publishes bugs as soon as they are found. Sure, it panics newbies to see declared errors, but sometimes the open community (e.g. the world) is able to fix the problem in record time once exposed.

Microsoft, on the other hand, have taken the opposite approach. Where such bugs happen (and they do) official Microsoft policy is to keep the errors under wraps until after they are fixed.... when that eventually happens.

...you do the math.

 

 

P.S. If you have specific problem, perhaps you could write up the symptoms on your own computer? If there are hardware conflicts others may be able to help out. Also, while it is possible to run Linux comfortably "out of the box", many of the Open Sourcers actually like the idea of tinkering with configuration files. Conversely it's illegal to reverse engineer Microsoft design (try reading the EULA).

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

Well, Lancer, your latter point sounds more like Apple than Microsoft. At least Microsoft will announce they found a bug and is working on a solution. Apple won't even tell you until they fix it so you'll be running your operating system without actually knowing if there's a bug in the system.As for this DBus 1.2.6 fiasco, hopefully, they'll just repackage it with the correct configuration file. It's just a configuration oopsie and from a developer's perspective, it shouldn't be all too hard. What appalls me is the lack of testing before they discovered this little mistake especially since this is not a software bug but an actual human error. The software works perfectly, it's just the human tuning part is flawed.xboxrulz

[Animator 0]

Well, Lancer, your latter point sounds more like Apple than Microsoft. At least Microsoft will announce they found a bug and is working on a solution. Apple won't even tell you until they fix it so you'll be running your operating system without actually knowing if there's a bug in the system.

No, I do mean Microsoft. They officially announced a policy revision a year or two ago where they were moving from openly declaring newly discovered bugs & vulnerabilities to waiting until after the errors had been fixed. I've been unsuccessful in trying to google exact references, which seem to have been snowed under by every other policy change. The Linux community were somewhat unimpressed at the time, and I thought how sadly easy it would be for issues to get delayed indefinitely.

 

This article: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ kind of shows what I'm talking about, but what I remember is an official policy change by Microsoft, that they would thereafter keep a lid on errors as normal practice.

Edited December 9, 2008 by Lancer (see edit history)

[Mordent 0]

...*snip*...As for this DBus 1.2.6 fiasco, hopefully, they'll just repackage it with the correct configuration file. It's just a configuration oopsie and from a developer's perspective, it shouldn't be all too hard. What appalls me is the lack of testing before they discovered this little mistake especially since this is not a software bug but an actual human error. The software works perfectly, it's just the human tuning part is flawed.

xboxrulz

Oh, agreed that the issue isn't all that hard to resolve, but I'm not holding my breath until that update package comes through. I'll admit that the main problem with this particular "update" is that someone popped it on to the update stream before it should have been, but it's amazing what a few clicks can do to a whole community of people worldwide when a fair few bits of their OS suddenly stop working as they should.

From what I can gather, Fedora updates on a Sunday, but as I'm unable to do any update checks (due to the DBus bug) I'm not sure whether I'll be able to "update" around it this Sunday coming. What if Fedora is unable to update? I'm not saying that everything won't be alright, but I'm curious as to what us Linux-newbies are supposed to do should something like that end up happening.

Still, come Christmas I'll have access to my Windows XP discs again. I certainly prefer the idea of Linux when it comes to the ideas of an OS being open-source, but I get the impression that it's better to have both an OS that you agree with and one that you're comfortable with on the same system. It sounds like I'll be having a bit more fun trying to partition my hard drive and get the dual boot idea going again. Still, this time I'll make sure I have everything backed up before I start tinkering...

Come on Sunday, where are you?

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

No, I do mean Microsoft. They officially announced a policy revision a year or two ago where they were moving from openly declaring newly discovered bugs & vulnerabilities to waiting until after the errors had been fixed. I've been unsuccessful in trying to google exact references, which seem to have been snowed under by every other policy change. The Linux community were somewhat unimpressed at the time, and I thought how sadly easy it would be for issues to get delayed indefinitely.

 

This article: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ kind of shows what I'm talking about, but what I remember is an official policy change by Microsoft, that they would thereafter keep a lid on errors as normal practice.

Oh well, that's not really an issue for me, I'm too busy to care what needs to be fixed as long as it's going to be fixed.

 

Oh, agreed that the issue isn't all that hard to resolve, but I'm not holding my breath until that update package comes through. I'll admit that the main problem with this particular "update" is that someone popped it on to the update stream before it should have been, but it's amazing what a few clicks can do to a whole community of people worldwide when a fair few bits of their OS suddenly stop working as they should.

 

From what I can gather, Fedora updates on a Sunday, but as I'm unable to do any update checks (due to the DBus bug) I'm not sure whether I'll be able to "update" around it this Sunday coming. What if Fedora is unable to update? I'm not saying that everything won't be alright, but I'm curious as to what us Linux-newbies are supposed to do should something like that end up happening.

 

Still, come Christmas I'll have access to my Windows XP discs again. I certainly prefer the idea of Linux when it comes to the ideas of an OS being open-source, but I get the impression that it's better to have both an OS that you agree with and one that you're comfortable with on the same system. It sounds like I'll be having a bit more fun trying to partition my hard drive and get the dual boot idea going again. Still, this time I'll make sure I have everything backed up before I start tinkering...

 

Come on Sunday, where are you?

I would recommend you just run Windows in a virtual machine unless you need 3D application support.

 

xboxrulz

[Mordent 0]

Oh well, that's not really an issue for me, I'm too busy to care what needs to be fixed as long as it's going to be fixed.I would recommend you just run Windows in a virtual machine unless you need 3D application support.

xboxrulz

I'd have to say I've never tried running virtual machines, and never intend to. I'll admit that I use Windows because I'm familiar with it, but the other main reason is, naturally, the fact that I've yet to find a means of playing computer games pretty flawlessly on Linux.

As said games are mainly pretty graphics intensive, I'll stick with using Windows with them for now, although I'm loathe to have to "upgrade" to Vista to get the "most" of my fairly nice machine. Note that I put a couple words in quotation marks, as I don't really see the move as a positive step, at least for now.

In other news, after browsing various Fedora forums and such I've worked out that I can still use yum to install bits and pieces.

[Animator 0]

In other news, after browsing various Fedora forums and such I've worked out that I can still use yum to install bits and pieces.

Yes, apparently so. The severity of this specific bug is particularly high I might add, in terms of it affecting the update procedure itself. Sounds like you are keeping abreast of things, and know of the fixes etc. being produced.
One or two circular dependencies are common from time to time, depending on your distro and which applications you choose to run on that distro. These dependency problems do tend to spike when a distro either releases new reivions (some packages are occasionally in limbo as they are slow to be reintroduced into the pipeline), or drops support for older versions (the repository banks freeze)... they do try... it's usually just that there are so many different sources for so many packages.

So anyway, what I was saying earlier about this being "normal" was referring to the occasional update hitch. This one, affecting the update process itself, is not as common.

[Mordent 0]

Just so anyone who's interested knows, although I haven't had a chance to try this on my home machine yet (currently using a public PC), apparently the issue has been resolved. From fedoraforum.org:

Linky to topic

This just in from the fedora project!

Recently, an update of D-Bus software package in Fedora 10 caused thesubstantial breakage of some applications, including PackageKit. This
change left people using the distribution's default set of graphical
tools unable to update their systems properly to fix the problem. The
update was issued after being tagged as a security update, and was not
sufficiently tested before it was made available to all users through
our update repositories.

We apologize for the problem, which we realize has caused an annoyance
for many users. If your machine was affected by this problem and you
are unable to run a normal system update using PackageKit, you can
restore your system to full working order by doing the following:

1. Open a terminal. From the main menu, choose Applications, System
Tools, Terminal.

2. Use the following command to update the system from one of our
repository mirrors. The system prompts you for the root password.

$ su -c 'yum update'

3. Restart your computer, to ensure the system message bus is reset
appropriately.

Using our open mailing lists, the community is currently discussing
ways to improve Fedora's update processes, to minimize the chances of
this sort of situation recurring. Feel free to follow the
conversation on the list:

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

From the desk of Paul Frields.

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I expect to be able to give it a try in the next hour or two, so I'll let you know whether it solves the problems or not. Here's to hoping it does!

EDIT: Works like a charm.
Edited December 14, 2008 by Mordent (see edit history)