I am trying to upgrade from fedora 40 to 41. Got the banner under ‘software updates’ in the GUI to download. Download fails midway. Rinsed and repeated, same outcome.
Being a very experienced unix/linux guy, I investigated. Ran the upgrade using dnf CLI and discovered this as the cause of the problem:
[MIRROR] openh264-2.4.1-2.fc41.x86_64.rpm: Status code: 404 for http://ciscobinary.openh264.org/openh264-2.4.1-2.fc41.x86_64.rpm/ (IP: 23.201.34.170)
[FAILED] openh264-2.4.1-2.fc41.x86_64.rpm: No more mirrors to try - All mirrors were already tried without success
Did some digging and found some prior posts and suggestions such as:
bypassing the package entirely using dnf config (doesn’t really work when doing the upgrade because other packages like firefox depend on it)
suggesting that the repo is “blocked” for security reasons and using a vpn or the like to access it (not the issue here, see below)
But nothing that addressed this issue directly.
Being an experienced user I decided to download the package manually from the repo, which worked perfectly in that I was able to get the rpm file (i.e. #2 was not the issue, and it confirmed that the link that dnf was looking at was correct even though it’s repeatedly giving me a 404).
My thought was that I would just download the rpm and ‘wedge’ it into dnf (using baseurl in the .repo file in the yum.repos.d) but that doesn’t work because dnf wants the metadata I don’t have.
So my question is, how can I get the upgrade done? As I said, I am comfortable mucking with the guts of pretty much anything in linux so I just need guidance on the best way to make this work. It is extremely frustrating to me that an upgrade that should take 20 minutes is stopped dead in its tracks by a 3rd party package that isn’t really essential to anything other than watching videos or playing games, and there doesn’t appear to be an easy way around it since other packages (like firefox) that you kinda want to have depend on it.
I’ve been a Debian user since the 90’s. Also used other distros when needed. Anyways, I decided today to install Fedora since I haven’t used Red Hat for 15-20 years. And I read it was a really stable distro nowadays with the latest packages and good driver support out of the box. I’m installing via netinstaller as usual.
Well, IT IS NOT POSSIBLE install Fedora 41 (default settings with Gnome) because this package is needed and NO mirrors are found.
Seriously. What a joke…
ZERO mirrors works with “fedora-cisco-openh264”. There’s NO option to NOT include this package during GUI installation. It just fails and stops.
Its like re-living the 90’s all over again. Back when pretty much all distros of Linux was pretty time consuming to install. Except Debian.
Having the same problem myself, I loved my last few months of Fedora and everytime I see KDE plasma it looks so good. And just went to update and trim stuff to work with my setup when I saw the same error code.
And so on my fresh install seeing “oopsie! There’s no files for you to update!” on a banner that says “846 things need updating” is like, bewildering lol.
Hoping someone figures out the solution or an update comes out soon, I really wanna use FKDE
100% agree that there is no way around this from what I see, but I also acknowledge that someone who actually works on Fedora might have an answer (and that’s what I’m trying to find out).
Obviously if you can’t even install the OS it’s pretty useless. I too am an old Red Hat user with lots of experience with different distros (going all the way back to the days when RH was completely free and Fedora didn’t even exist) and it pains me that stuff like this happens–doesn’t anybody do any basic unit testing before release? If the problem is with the 3rd party server then at least provide a mechanism to work around it!
I have Debian on other machines but wanted to keep this particular one on Fedora. Until someone (hopefully) gives me a way to get around this issue then it’s going to be Fedora 40 for now I guess. But I’m with you that I’m back to Debian if there is no solution forthcoming.
It was not the server issue or anything like that, the maintainer just made a mistake when editing the “http://ciscobinary.openh264.org/openh264-2.4.1-2.fc41.x86_64.rpm/” he left the “/” on the end by mistake and dnf could not find that address because it does not exist, one of the workarounds were just opening the link in the browser and removing the / on the end and that would download the rpm that you could have easily installed yourself if you really needed that upgrade.
I upgraded to F41 2-or 3 weeks ago and did not have this problem. However my repos list has been wiped on F40 and I had to reconstruct it. This is my file for this cisco h264, which might differ from the original. It worked flawlessly still.
I did download the rpm as you suggested but dnf won’t install it without the metadata. Perhaps there is a way around this (I’m not a dnf expert) in which case I’ll gladly take instruction on what to do.
DNF is also not happy because I already have the F40 version of the package installed. Yes, I could probably uninstall the F40 version then install the F41 version, but the issue here is that I am trying to do an OS upgrade via
sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=41
and you can’t get that to complete successfully right now. Even when wrapped in the “software update” panel of the GUI it doesn’t work (because it’s doing the exact same thing under the hood as evidenced by getting the exact same error when it fails).
Maybe I’m just a guy with (by today’s standards) unreasonably high expectations, but to me it’s very bad practice to have a published, recommended way to do an upgrade that doesn’t work. If the maintainer made an error then the error should be fixed and the upgrade instructions should explain what a user should do to get the fix so that the recommended method works if additional steps are required.
If I buy a car, and I press the button to start it, it should start. It’s not acceptable to say “well the engineers made a mistake, so pop the hood, find relay 7 and apply 12V across terminals 2 and 3.” Especially when doing that won’t even start the car anyway.
I am sorry if what I told you was a lie, the method that I wrote to you is the method that I saw on other discussions and it worked for some and for some it did not, it was just a thing to try if you really wanted to get it working at the moment, it was pretty harmless and worth a shot. Once again sorry if I offended you in some way.
No offense taken at all. I appreciate any suggestions even if I don’t agree with them. We’re all on the same team.
If I came across as offended it’s only because I spent several hours on an upgrade that I expected would take 20 minutes…if I had known what I was getting myself into I would have better prepared myself by having a glass of wine first.
