Upgrade Fedora 42 -> 43 failed and left system broken

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1

Hi, I was upgrading from 42 to 43 follwing the instructions at

The installation ran and the system appeared to reboot successfully (although the progress bar was around 50% just some moments before), but something failed because my system is broken

All kernels listed on the boot menu are still from release 42, even though there is a kernel-code-6.17.12-300.fc43 (and kernel-modules*) package installed.

Plasma doesn’t show the task bar and krunner always crashes unexpectedly.

Dnf’s repositories appear to be stuck in release 42:

 dnf5 repolist --enabled  
repo id                       repo name                                     
brave-browser                 Brave Browser                                 
docker-ce-stable              Docker CE Stable - x86_64                     
Dropbox                       Dropbox Repository                            
fedora                        Fedora 42 - x86_64                            
fedora-cisco-openh264         Fedora 42 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64      
insync                        insync repo                                   
packages-microsoft-com-prod   Microsoft Production                          
rpmfusion-free                RPM Fusion for Fedora 42 - Free               
rpmfusion-free-updates        RPM Fusion for Fedora 42 - Free - Updates     
rpmfusion-nonfree             RPM Fusion for Fedora 42 - Nonfree            
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates     RPM Fusion for Fedora 42 - Nonfree - Updates  
slack                         slack                                         
updates                       Fedora 42 - x86_64 - Updates

and sudo dnf distro-sync --allowerasing --skip-broken

fails saying some protected packages would be removed

: dnf5, grub2-tools-minimal, plasma-desktop, selinux-policy-targeted, setup
, sudo, systemd, systemd-udev

The only main difference from another system I upgrade successfully is that this one had some nvidia drivers.

Any pointers to how I could fix my system will be appreciated.

Thanks

2

Update: After reading some topics here that mentioned similar problems, I tried

sudo dnf distro-sync --allowerasing --refresh --skip-broken --
setopt=protected_packages=

But it failed due to some due to some conficts (the output messages are in portuguese, but they say the file is in conflict with the one in the package):

 - o ficheiro /usr/lib/rpm/macros.d/macros.gap-srpm da instalação do redha
t-rpm-config-342-4.fc42.noarch está em conflito com o ficheiro do pacote ga
p-srpm-macros-2-1.fc43.noarch
 - o ficheiro /usr/lib/rpm/macros.d/macros.java-srpm da instalação do redh
at-rpm-config-342-4.fc42.noarch está em conflito com o ficheiro do pacote j
ava-srpm-macros-1-7.fc43.noarch
3

There are 3 things to note there.

  1. the conflicting package in both messages is redhat-rpm-config-342-4.fc42.noarch which is already installed.
  2. The other packages that conflict are gap-srpm-macros-2-1.fc43.noarch and java-srpm-macros-1-7.fc43.noarch
  3. The net result is that it seems the packages in #2 seem to be trying to update before the package in #1 is updated so the conflict appears. (generally it seems updates are tried in alphabetical/lexicographical order so that makes sense)

Try this
sudo dnf upgrade redhat-rpm-config
sudo dnf install gap-srpm-macros java-srpm-macros
then follow that with your command from above
sudo dnf distro-sync --allowerasing --refresh --skip-broken --setopt=protected_packages=

It appears that those last 2 packages being installed may be new (they do not appear to exist in the f42 repos). The upgrade seems to not properly manage it since the version of redhat-rpm-config in f42 contains files that were moved to the newer packages in #2 above.

Let us know the results.

1 Like
4

Thanks for your response.

I should have waited for it before messing around, but unfortunately, after looking at discussions about similar issues, I tried something else which failed midway through and left the system even more broken - now I can’t even boot , just get a “kernel panic” message even in rescue mode.

I think I’ll just reinstall from scratch.

1 Like