[CentOS] Fedora bugs and EOL [was Re: CentOS users: please try and provide feedback on Fedora] Boltron

Mon Jul 31 11:15:29 UTC 2017
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 07/30/2017 02:07 PM, Walter H. wrote:
> On 30.07.2017 20:22, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>> On 07/30/2017 09:41 AM, Walter H. wrote:
>>> On 30.07.2017 14:29, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>>>> I personally have a Fedora machine that I keep updated and do some work
>>>> on all the time learning/testing.  I just seamlessly upgraded it from
>>>> Fedora 25 to Fedora 26 using a couple of dnf commands .. awesome
>>>> experience actually.
>>> because of this feature to upgrade from one release to the next, I
>>> thought to test this on my old computer;
>>> fedora itself works fine, but this upgrade from 25 to 26 broke the
>>> vmware workstaion completely ...
>>> it doesn't work any more, any hints in net which could be found don't
>>> work ...
>>> and this was the goal to have a linux running with vmware workstation
>>> instead of my old windows ...
>>>
>>> but as it seems there is no way of achiving this ...
>>>
>> Looking at VMWare Workstation, it does not seem to run on Fedora at all.
>> It seems to run on :
>>
>>      Ubuntu 16.04
>>      Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1
>>      CentOS 7.1
>>      Oracle Linux 7
>>      openSUSE 13.2
>>      SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12
>>
>> So, I'm not sure how it was running on Fedora 25 to get messed up by an
>> upgrade to Fedora 26.
>>
> with Fedora 25 everything worked fine, even the upgrade from VMware Wkst
> 12.5.6 to 12.5.7 with automatic recompilation of neccessary kernel modules
> without my intervention ...
> and the same when a kernel upgrade among other updates occured on Fedora
> 25, everything worked fine ...
> 
> but the upgrade from F25 to F26 killed my VMware Workstation :-(
> even the updates which occured after this upgrade didn't help ...

Running external things like VMWare Workstation (or other 3rd party
custom compiled apps) is exactly what enterprise distros like RHEL,
CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, SUSE SLES are designed for .. running things already
compiled for a long period of time while providing security updates.

It is not just kernel modules that need to be compiled to run on a give
linux distribution, but everything that uses any specific shared
libraries linked against has to be compatible as well as the main shared
libraries (glibc).

Looking at F25 and f26,  GCC (the compiler) 6.2.5 in f25 and 7.1.1 in
f26 and the glibc versions are 2.24 (f25) and 2.25 (f26), I am not sure
how compatible those are to one another .. I am also not sure what other
libraries that VMWare Worstation might link against.  VMWare Workstation
will likely need to be recompiled to be compatible with F26. Again,
running 3rd party apps is one area where cutting edge Linux distros
(like fedora, ubuntu, opensuse, etc.) are at a disadvantage until the
3rd party makes a compatible compile of their program.  If the 3rd party
app is open source, you can try recompiling it yourself .. I doubt
VMWare Workstation provides an easily compilable version of their source
code for this purpose.

If Windows is what you are trying to run, doing that on KVM works fine
and the VMs are (usually :D) able to run as is when upgrading. to other
versions.




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