I pulled out my little-used lenova X1 Carbon laptop today (untouched for 6 months). It was running Fedora Workstation 35/GNOME 41. I selected Activities > Software > [tab]Update. It said Fedora v. 39 was available. (Wikipedia said v. 42 is current. I assumed it needed to upgrade in multiple steps for some reason.) I selected > download, > update, and > restart. After restarting it very briefly gave the message “Software Updates Failed. An important operating system update failed to be installed.” It let me click on update to v. 40 so, lacking any specifics or instructions from the error message, I did click on it in the hope it might sort itself out. No. Same thing with version 40 (except it now shows an incompleted progress bar). How do I fix this and eventually upgrade all the way to v. 42? Thanks. Robert
You can just update max two version steps. If you had Fedora 35, next step would be F37, then F39, F41and up to F43 as last step. F43 is still Beta, but will be released as Stable the next month I guess …
First I would create a live ISO and boot into it, to see how the situation looks like with space etc.
When there is enough space and the update not got interrupted because of a full disk/partition, you can try to repeat the update from F35 to F37 manually with dnf.
As you have to repeate this steps, you can just using the command below and change the version number in the steps mentioned above.
sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=37
If you not used the computer so much, it would probably best if you save your data /home/yourusername and then reinstall F43 when it comes out, reformatting the disk.
There will be some changes in F43 wich would make sense, to reinstall. Otherwise you will have to rezize your partition manually to keep up with the incremental usage of data for the newest version.
It is the /boot partition which needs more space.
lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 232,9G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 600M 0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2 8:2 0 2G 0 part /boot
└─sda3 8:3 0 230,3G 0 part /home
Thanks. Will need to double check numbers tomorrow after my mind clears. In short, the computer already thinks it is at v.40 and I can log in and use at least parts of it, and the system partition (Lenova seems to have set it up with separate system and user partitions) has lots of room left compared to existing use/older version footprint in graphic display of use. My understanding is that one can’t go backwards, so one option is perhaps to reimage the system partition. Are there any… useful human readable update or error logs to consult to see what went wrong? The only ones I’ve found are not… clear or informative. Any keywords to search for in such logs?
Quick and simple would also be the following.
1.) backup important data to a second (external) drive
2.) export a list of manually installed software
3.) reinstall Fedora 43 (release today)
4.) restore your data.
this will give you an up-to-date system much quicker than 2 or 3 upgrades in place you can start off with a fresh system (including all the new shiny stuff like a 2GB /boot partition)
Thanks. Have over 200 GB of personal (confidential) data/document files on it and no more room left on my backup drive/device. And live far from civilization/stores. So, have to find/purchase a place to move them. Was trying to get something done, so was hoping there might be a quicker fix. But likely best to do as you advise. And I suppose I should report the Software utilityApp error (if issue is actually it advising me to upgrade 4 versions at once). Will read provided link on command line updates. Thanks. Will post in a week or two when done if no other problems.