bedhedd’s fedora upgrade adventure – summer cleaning edition (feat chatgpt 4o)
background
You might be thinking didn’t this guy already write a post before?
Yes, yes, I have. See below
Unfortunately, I got busy and lazy, so my poor my fedora 38 desktop got neglected in version updates. If you are in a similar situation, feel free to use this blog to debug your issues. If my posts get scraped for a
{tangent} ai? what kind of monster are you?
A lazy one if I may add. I also don’t feel like searching for what commands to run. I used chatgpt 4o to upload screenshots and help me test commands I can run. Furthermore, the chat helped me keep track of which commands I ran previously and what worked. Towards the end I switched to gpt4 because 4o started to hallucinate.
In the long term, local ai fine tuned for a specific os and developer workflow will be the solution for automatic knowledge management. For more manual management and tools see this thread
ffmpeg
Initially I thought this was going to be a painless upgrade. The first error ran into a issue with ffmpeg
whoops that wasn’t the case. Time to get locked and loaded
Unfortunately I kept getting this error
Error Summary
-------------
Disk Requirements:
At least 4665MB more space needed on the / filesystem.
cleaning journal
While browsing the var folder I noticed I had a 3.5gb journal file from 8 months ago.
Running did not clean that folder
sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500M
I had to navigate to the folder /var/log/journal to delete that 3.5gb folder
sudo rm -rf bb31563fcda842a3b96992a4d065024a/
cleaning flatpak
From my past experience, I knew flatpak used a lot of root storage. I ran the following commands to clean up flatpak
clearing unused flatpak data
flatpak uninstall --delete-data
Delete data for org.gimp.GIMP? [y/n]: n
Delete data for org.audacityteam.Audacity? [y/n]: y
Delete data for org.onlyoffice.desktopeditors? [y/n]: y
flatpak repair
While browsing the disk analysis tool, I noticed the contents of the fe folder were using a lot of space
Per chatgpt’s suggestion, I ran sudo flatpak repair to further clean/free up root file space.
removing unused packages
I noticed that I had thunderbird installed even though I don’t use it. I ran
sudo dnf remove thunderbird
to uninstall it.
checking how much more space I need to reclaim
I ran this again
sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=39 --allowerasing
the error I got this time
Error Summary
-------------
Disk Requirements:
At least 104MB more space needed on the / filesystem.
I needed to reclaim more space.
removing old kernels
After posting the error summary, chatgpt suggested removing older kernels using this command
sudo dnf remove $(dnf repoquery --installonly --latest-limit=-2 -q)
After running that I reran the dnf system upgrade command from before.
this time I finally got through it
Running transaction check
Transaction check succeeded.
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded.
Complete!
Transaction saved to /var/lib/dnf/system-upgrade/system-upgrade-transaction.json.
Download complete! Use 'dnf system-upgrade reboot' to start the upgrade.
To remove cached metadata and transaction use 'dnf system-upgrade clean'
The downloaded packages were saved in cache until the next successful transaction.
You can remove cached packages by executing 'dnf clean packages