I tried doing an update of fedora the other day, with the dnf system upgrade business, to upgrade in place. I should have known better. The failure is almost certainly related to the ongoing frustration of the graphics card.

One is offered the choice of two nice poisons. One may elect to use the open source nouveau driver, in which case the graphics driver will spontaneously crash about once a week forcing a reboot. Or, alternatively, one may choose instead to install the proprietary nvidia driver, in which case every few months one will get a new kernel that invalidates the driver, and the machine will suddenly not boot at all, requiring that you get in and fool around with grub and intitramfs until you can get it up enough to download and rebuild a new nvidia driver.

The much ballyhooed DKMS which is supposed to solve this problem has never worked for me – that I know of. I suppose there could have been times when it magically worked and I DIDN’T have a failure, and didn’t know that I had dodged a bullet. But for sure I know when it does fail.

And the worst time for all this is upon attempting to do the Fedora update. I knew I should not try it. It has always failed. I have specifically bought a little two drawer 2.5″ removable so that I can install onto a new SSD, and then switch back when it doesn’t work. It is only Fedora; I don’t fear doing it on Ubuntu, though I have had issues on occasion there as well. But on Fedora my experience is that it always fails. 

But you never know – one of these days Fedora’s upgrade in place may actually work. And if I never try it on a new release of Fedora, I won’t know it has been fixed, if they ever fix it.

It took two days to get oregano back. In the meantime I had the problem that, for historical reasons (and stupidity on my part) oregano plays an essential part in the internal network. When oregano is down, dhcp is down, dns forwarding is down, the main firewall is down, etc. This has to change. See the next post.