My name is Bert, I'm on the Centos-Doc mailing list and
I've been doing a bit of further write up on the C6.5 -> C7
upgrade process - basically on how to avoid common problems
and pitfalls. In other words, give the user the best
experience possible. I've been doing a fair bit of
experimenting before I go ahead and "put up a bunch of
suggested ways of doing things to avoid problematic upgrades"
and would like to share what I've learnt so far, and ask for
some more info.
Regarding issue #1:
I too did an upgrade on that had an NTFS partition (was
for dual-boot Windows 2008R2). I commented out the
mountpoint in /etc/fstab BEFORE doing the upgrade (as
removing ntfs3g would obviously cause mount to complain it
didn't know about the partition, and there's no FUSE add-ons
in the upgrade image kernel) and that avoided any problems
for me. It is helpful to know from your experience that the
upgrade process ended up in an emergency shell. This will
scare some people, so I will be adding a specific note about
checking for mount points (specifically that use FUSE
add-ons) and a suggestion to comment them out of /etc/fstab
before running the preupgrade advisor.
I suggest commenting them out and unmounting before
running the advisor because (from what I gather) the tool
scans and any all mount points collecting a list of files,
which wastes time on the NTFS partition. You wouldn't expect
someone to install Linux-related libraries or executables on
their NTFS partition... though you never know.
One system of mine also had a md RAID6 array, which I
unmounted and commented out for the same reasons above.
After the upgrade, yum isntall ntfs-3g went as expected,
and un-commenting the mountpoint got it mounting again.
I'm glad that worked for you in the end.
Perhaps there are issues with automount that you were
encountering prior to the upgrade. With the new
Regarding issue #2:
My write-up basically guides the user through removing
(read as exorcising if you'll pardon the expression)
anything X Window System and Gnome related before running
the upgrade advisor (at least for the last time).
I include the X window system packages because there have
been a few changes that I suspect would lead to a "bad
experience". Some preferences seem to have been brought
across after a re-install once running C7.
There was a couple of tricks I did before the upgrade.
1. Change to runlevel 3 so the GUI doesn't start up
straight after the upgrade. (i.e. get to a text-only shell)
so we can re-install our GUI aftewards.
2. Removed X, Gnome and MESA packages.
I had disabled NetworkManager and for the interfaces in
the ifcfg scripts so I can't comment on NM-related issues
but there were a few niggles after the upgrade.
Post upgrade...
yum groups mark convert
to fix the group package assignment changes between C6
and C7.
yum groups install "GNOME Desktop" "Graphical
Administration Tools"
to install GNOME again... It's no longer "yum
groupinstall ....."
This more/less got GNOME up and running again for me
(via VNC server)
Once in GNOME, use the package maanger to install
anything else.
/etc/inittab is no longer relevant. Use
ln -sf /lib/systemd/system/graphical.target
/etc/systemd/system/default.target
to get X and your window manager starting up by
default.
Network manager:
Was starting again by default. Once I got around that,
and switching over to fiewall-cmd (from plain IPTABLES) and
setting up an appropriate zone, my networking has been fine.
May I ask, why did you choose to install MATE? Could you
not get GNOME working?
Can anyone else comment on NM? (before and after)