Fedora 21 to Fedora 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35 upgrade, the saga continues

Major changes happened with KDE between F21 and F22, and my .kde configs didn't work, so I stayed on F21 for a long time.  Also I was bit by the enforcement of UID must be greater than 1000 policy, if UID is under 1000 you can't login.  Took ages to figure out what was going on with this. /etc/sddm.conf has a bug.  It seems the format changed, and when you do an upgrade it saves your old sddm.conf and renames the newer version to sddm.conf.rpmnew.  How nice.  Except, the old sddm.conf file doesn't seem to work right with the new sddm.  Manually editing sddm.conf.rpmnew and adding the one whole option I wanted (allow UIDs under 1000 to login via the GUI) then mv sddm.conf.rpmnew to sddm.conf fixed the problem.  This is of course KDE 5 on Fedora 25.

Another KDE change that was a time waster to figure out, no longer can you just copy .kde to move your GUI setup to a new system, you need to copy .local and .config as well, exactly which files in those directories KDE uses I've yet to figure out.

Fedora 34! Major changes! Btrfs with compression is default. PipeWire replaces PulseAudio. Wayland replaces X11. "Things happen" with the NVIDIA driver.

DON'T Upgrade?!? But I have to!!!

ALL of this sound like a headache? Happy with the version you're on? But need that one thing that's only available in a later release? Don't upgrade (or at least delay it) by launching a new release as a VM!
youtube-dl comes to mind.....

Three easy commands for the upgrade:

dnf upgrade --refresh
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=35 --allowerasing -y

dnf system-upgrade reboot

(Below is only a problem if you try to skip ahead a few version, like F21 to F25)

And again, bit by the invalid keys issues!  Had to grab the keys and put them into /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/ by hand, then run the dnf system-upgrade again.  Also had to add the --allowerasing due to a problem with a couple of RPMs.

Get the F25 keys here, 4 in total, free, nonfree, primary, secondary:

https://rpmfusion.org/keys
https://getfedora.org/keys/

RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-25-primary
RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-25-secondary
RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora-25-primary
RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-25-primary

Add links and stir:

cd /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/
ln -s RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-25-primary RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-25
ln -s RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-25-primary RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-25-x86_64
ln -s RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora-25-primary RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora-25
ln -s RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-25-primary RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-25

Final step:
dnf system-upgrade reboot

And we're done!  Besides the key thing, Fedora Linux upgrades are pretty smooth, a few commands, one reboot and you're there, no need to wipe the disks, insert dvds, backup/restore, none of that stuff.  All data files, home dirs, network configs are preserved threw each version upgrade.  There's probably a GUI button to do as well.
Best to be on a wired connection though, as the upgrade pulls in about 3,000 packages, at least a GB of data.

Well, almost, have just done another F21 to F25 upgrade, I had to throw in a --exclude=packagename
to get by a problem.  That happens when you install weird repos with oddball packages like I do.

Now I'm up to F31, 5000+ packages to download!

My Acer Aspire i7-8700/ NVMe desktop took less than 10 minutes to upgrade from F30 to F31!

As of F37 you can still choose X11 or Wayland at login, at least with KDE. I've had strangeness running Kodi under Wayland. 

USB stick boot fun, issues, gotchas

If you need to instal a new system, always use a USB stick, not the SD slot, not a SD card in a reader.

Avoid the "liveusb-creator" GUI's and use the DD command. 

Step 1, down some Fedora release as a .iso.  Plug in your USB stick, use dmesg to see what drive letter the computer assigned to the USB stick.  Use DD to write the .iso to the stick, as root or sudo.

Keep in mind, if you pick the wrong drive letter you may wipe out your internal drive!!!  The below output tells us the Samsung USB stick got drive letter B, as in /dev/sdb.

oralab<19>% dmesg

[ 3609.068811] scsi host6: usb-storage 4-2:1.0
[ 3610.403164] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Samsung  Flash Drive FIT  1100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 3610.404016] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[ 3610.405254] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 250626566 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/120 GiB)
[ 3610.405373] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 3610.405376] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
[ 3610.405503] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 3610.405506] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Optimal transfer size 0 bytes < PAGE_SIZE (4096 bytes)
[ 3610.407571]  sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3
[ 3610.408389] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Take a look at df -k, make doubly certain you understand what your live file systems are!

Next step:

oralab<33># dd if=Fedora-KDE-Live-x86_64-29-1.2.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=8M status=progress oflag=direct

This may take some time, like 5 minutes for a USB2 stick, and 1 minute for a USB3 stick, and look for the "SS" letters on the computer USB port, those are your USB3 ports. Btw I'm using tcsh shell.

dd: failed to open '/dev/sdb': No medium found

Note - there are differences between umount and eject that can bite you! umount from the command line, don't use the GUI!

locnar<38># dd if=Fedora-KDE-Live-x86_64-31-1.9.iso  of=/dev/sdb bs=8M status=progress oflag=direct
221+1 records in
221+1 records out
1854996480 bytes (1.9 GB, 1.7 GiB) copied, 22.5527 s, 82.3 MB/s

oralab<33># eject /dev/sdb

Next comes the fun part, Legacy vs UEFI boot.  You *may* need to get into the BIOS (hold down F12 or enter key or del while powering up) and change the boot options, possibly set USB device to boot first, maybe change the security tab UEFI options, it depends on the machine, how old it is, what BIOS rev it has.  Also turn on virtualization support when you're in the BIOS.

Put the USB stick in (hopefully) a USB3 port and power on. Fedora releases generally make you click on the Install Disk item and select the drive to use, and/or reclaim space. Very likely you'll need to DOUBLE CLICK the drive icon and get a highlight check on the drive. This drive selection step confuses a lot of users. 

Final step, reboot from the Fedora Live menu, DON'T just the turn the computer off and on again! 

Fedora 29 Linux on Acer Aspire TC-885-UR17 Desktop with NVME, hold down Delete key while booting, BIOS/peripheral setting and change the SSD/NVME to ahci, by default a lot of laptops now have them set in RAID which doesn't work right in Linux.

Just installed an Acer Aspire TC-1660-UA92, the only hard part was finding the ahci setting in the BIOS/boot menu.

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'libdnf::ModulePackageContainer::EnableMultipleStreamsException'
Cannot enable multiple streams for module

What this goop means is something to do with  "dnf module", this is the fix:

dnf module reset gimp
dnf module reset maven

The above was seen when going from F30 to F31.

  dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=35 --allowerasing -y --nogpgcheck --exclude=clang12-libs-12.0.1-3.fc35

 dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=36 --allowerasing -y --exclude="compat-ffmpeg4*"

yum erase libavutil56-1:4.4.4-1.fc37