[CentOS-devel] centos 6 to 7 upgrade tool report

Fri Sep 26 14:00:15 UTC 2014
David Mansfield <centos at dm.cobite.com>

Hi All,

I used the upgrade tool on a centos 6.5 fully-updated system, used as a 
graphical workstation with GDM and gnome2.

Before going into details, I want to thank the CentOS team for all the 
hard work over the years, and especially the top-notch effort to get C7 
out, and kudos to the individuals getting the upgrade tool to work too. 
I feel spoiled.

Back to the story:

The system had significant use of 3rd party repositories.

After I ran the pre-upgrade tool, I used the report of "unsigned" 
packages (which includes the source repo in the report, which is very 
useful) to remove all of these packages before update.

I ran the tool again and was satisfied that the list of inplace upgrade 
risks was acceptable and ran the update.

Issue#1:
The system upgraded and rebooted to the emergency recovery shell. This 
was because an NTFS partition could not be mounted (ntfs-3g not 
installed by default during upgrade for some reason). This was somewhat 
a problem for the user before the upgrade, so I cannot be 100% sure that 
mounting this a boot was always working 100% before.

Solution#1
I commented it from fstab and rebooted - 1st problem solved (see Issue#4 
below).

Issue#2:
The system booted to a black screen with a movable mouse cursor - GDM 
not working.

I tried a bunch of things - uninstalling GNOME stuff, re-installing, 
installing a bunch of package groups.  This one had me stumped for quite 
a while.

Solution#2
Ultimately, the solution was (I believe) that some modifications in 
/etc/pam.d needed to be merged from the .rpmnew files.

On this system, I don't believe the pam.d configuration had been 
modified from defaults, so I copied the .rpmnew files over (beware: this 
can be dangerous) and voila!

Issue#3:
I installed MATE Desktop from epel, and things looked good except that 
NetworkManager wasn't running:

Solution#3:
service NetworkManager start
chkconfig NetworkManager on

Issue#4:
Back to the NTFS volume not mounting.

Solution#4:
I installed ntfs-3g packages and everything mounts fine through 
nautilus, which is all the user needs.

Now everything I could test is working, spice client, Citrix client, 
google-chrome, vlc, rhythmbox playing mp3s, handbrake (thanks "nux" 
again), VPN etc.

Hope this helps, I was going to update the wiki, but there's no edit button!

-- 
Thanks,
David Mansfield
Cobite, INC.