F18 -> F19 distro-sync with yum

I woke up this morning to see my F18 instance not giving me the GNOME login screen. It just hangs after systemd brings up wpa_supplicant.service. And, throws this message:

systemd-readahead

Failed to read event: value too large for defined datatype

I fired up an F18 live-usb to see open a browser and check if there any existing bugs. Indeed there was one. It’s in ASSIGNED state. But I haven’t delved deep into the issue.

I quickly tried a few things :

• Start the systemd-readahead-replay service manually

   $ systemctl start systemd-readahead-replay.service</ 

• Try to invoke Xorg from a virtual terminal with the below CLI

  $ Xorg :0 -background none -verbose \
    -seat seat0 -nolisten tcp vt1

• Boot into runlevel 3, and type init 5
• Remove quiet from Kernel command-line, to find more verbos logs. No errors absolutely in /var/log/Xorg.* or /var/log/messages

All to no avail. I was drawing a blank and didn’t have any alternative, I’m working remote currently, and I only have this Lenovo X220 with me. I decided to just upgrade to Schrödinger’s Cat (i.e. Fedora-19). Why not? – I’ve been working for months with Fedora-19 composes on more than 5 servers just fine (but they’re all just minimal @core only virt hosts). I invoked the below command and went for my lunch…

$ yum update yum; yum clean all \
  yum --releasever=19 distro-sync --nogpgcheck -y

…voila — after download/update/cleanup/verify of 4770 packages, Schrödinger’s Cat is ready !

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