Update 2009-05-24: Please read the comment from Paul W. Frields (Thank you, Paul!) regarding the upgrade process before following this tutorial. I recommend you to wait until Leonidas is officially released and to not use the Rawhide-branch. (The procedure will be the same as mentioned here, but without the “Display unstable test releases above” check box setting.)

As you may have seen from the banner I’ve installed on the upper right at my webpage, Fedora 11 Leonidas will be here in the next few days.

All of you using Fedora 10 right now and who can’t stand the wait to upgrade to Leonidas there is a way to upgrade today to the last snapshot of the yet unreleased version of Fedora 11 Leonidas.

First of all you’ll need the tool preupgrade, which can be found in the official repos and installed via

sudo yum install preupgrade

Start preupgrade via pressing F2 entering ‘preupgrade’ and pressing enter. You should be greeted with this window:

Preupgrade startup message

In the following diaogue you’ll have to select “Display unstable test releases above” and select “Rawhide” from the dropdown list. Again, make sure you’ve backup’d your important datas before applying your selection.

Preupgrade Release Selection

After the official release of Fedora 11 you will install a fedora-release transition package, which will change the release name from Rawhide to the general Leonidas release name. So you’ll not longer fetch Rawhide (beta/testing) packages unless you want it. (Make sure to update your system on time after the official release date, unless you might miss the fedora-release transition package and stay at the Rawhide-repositories — don’t panic: you can still disable them by hand in /etc/yum.repos.d/* or via the graphical package manager)

If you’re not using Linux or Fedora at now, Leonidas may be a great oppertunity to test it. There will be Live-CDs avaible after Leonidas is released, so you can test it without actually installing it on your machine.

Follow either the official Fedora Website for the release date or the counter at my site to be informed about the arrival of Fedora 11 Leonidas.

Web resources

• Official Fedora Website
• Leonidas Feature List
• Leonidas Release Schedule
• Leonidas Pre-Release Live-CD
• Upgrading from pre-relase to final relase at fedoraproject.org/wiki

Related Posts

• January 17, 2009 -- Fedora Yellow Update Manager (yum) Database-Errors (quick fix)
• September 8, 2009 -- Updated Wordpress, Result: New Design and Layout, Loss of Recordings
• February 13, 2010 -- Back again
• March 18, 2009 -- Finite State Machine Matrix-Style-C-Implementation (Function Pointers Addon)
• October 25, 2008 -- New Design
• September 8, 2008 -- Finite State Machine Matrix-Style C Implementation
• August 1, 2008 -- Interesting Statistics or Why Art Thou There
• July 15, 2008 -- Hello world!

rpmdb: Thread/process xxxxx/yyyyyyyyyy failed:
Thread died in Berkeley DB library

and yum stuck in the mid of the update process. This might have been due to an compromised ext-filesystem, as my laptop didn’t shutdown properly and maybe the journal got cluttered.

However, there is an easy way to get thinks back to a working state (at least for me), which might help others:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
rpm –rebuilddb

yum clean all
yum check-update

The first two lines remove the old database entries and rebuild the Berkely database. Make sure, that there are no other yum-services running while rebuilding the database (at least this is, what has been said in the bug-reports). The second two lines clean the yum cache and update the package lists. Yum should run without database errors now.

The error has multiple hits (though it’s obviously not a bug) on the Fedora bug-tracker (bug#471411, bug#468437, bug#462314, bug#479818 and bug#45303)

Related Posts

• May 24, 2009 -- Fedora 11 Leonidas, How to Upgrade
• March 18, 2009 -- Did you know…
• August 1, 2008 -- Interesting Statistics or Why Art Thou There