Upgrading Fedora 27 to Fedora 28

Fedora 28 was just officially released. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system to the latest version of Fedora. Fedora offers a command-line method for upgrading Fedora 27 to Fedora 28. The Fedora 28 Workstation also has a graphical upgrade method.

Upgrading Fedora 27 Workstation to Fedora 28

Soon after release time, a notification appears to tell you an upgrade is available. You can click the notification to launch the GNOME Software app. Or you can choose Software from GNOME Shell.

Choose the Updates tab in GNOME Software and you should see a window like this:

 

If you don’t see anything on this screen, try using the reload tool at the top left. It may take some time after release for all systems to be able to see an upgrade available.

Choose Download to fetch the upgrade packages. You can continue working until you reach a stopping point, and the download is complete. Then use GNOME Software to restart your system and apply the upgrade. Upgrading takes time, so you may want to grab a coffee and come back to the system later.

Using the command line

If you’ve upgraded from past Fedora releases, you are likely familiar with the dnf upgrade plugin. This method is the recommended and supported way to upgrade from Fedora 27 to Fedora 28. Using this plugin will make your upgrade to Fedora 28 simple and easy.

1. Update software and back up your system

Before you do anything, you will want to make sure you have the latest software for Fedora 27 before beginning the upgrade process. To update your software, use GNOME Software or enter the following command in a terminal.

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

Additionally, make sure you back up your system before proceeding. For help with taking a backup, see the backup series on the Fedora Magazine.

2. Install the DNF plugin

Next, open a terminal and type the following command to install the plugin:

sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade

3. Start the update with DNF

Now that your system is up-to-date, backed up, and you have the DNF plugin installed, you can begin the upgrade by using the following command in a terminal:

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=28

This command will begin downloading all of the upgrades for your machine locally to prepare for the upgrade. If you have issues when upgrading because of packages without updates, broken dependencies, or retired packages, add the ‐‐allowerasing flag when typing the above command. This will allow DNF to remove packages that may be blocking your system upgrade.

4. Reboot and upgrade

Once the previous command finishes downloading all of the upgrades, your system will be ready for rebooting. To boot your system into the upgrade process, type the following command in a terminal:

sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

Your system will restart after this. Many releases ago, the fedup tool would create a new option on the kernel selection / boot screen. With the dnf-plugin-system-upgrade package, your system reboots into the current kernel installed for Fedora 27; this is normal. Shortly after the kernel selection screen, your system begins the upgrade process.

Now might be a good time for a coffee break! Once it finishes, your system will restart and you’ll be able to log in to your newly upgraded Fedora 28 system.

Upgrading Fedora: Upgrade complete!

Resolving upgrade problems

On occasion, there may be unexpected issues when you upgrade your system. If you experience any issues, please visit the DNF system upgrade wiki page for more information on troubleshooting in the event of a problem.

If you are having issues upgrading and have third-party repositories installed on your system, you may need to disable these repositories while you are upgrading. For support with repositories not provided by Fedora, please contact the providers of the repositories.

Fedora Project community

88 Comments

  1. Matías de la Fuente

    As always, very useful post! Thanks!

  2. Kurt

    Worked like a charm upgrading from F27 to F28. Everything is looking good so far!

  3. badbanana

    so how to clean the cache that was downloaded?

    • Costa A.

      Have you tried “sudo dnf clean all” ?

  4. Peter Braet

    Had to remove manually libnice-gstreamer-0.1.14-1.fc27.x86_64 before the upgrade ( in LXQT terminal ) wanted to work, now I see in dnfdragora libnice-gstreamer-0.1.14-1.fc28.x86_64 is available, but it cannot be installed here. Impossible to watch a DVD-movie, screen turns black if I try.
    What happened to Livna? I need libdvdcss.
    And what is that onscreen keymap before login? I don’t need it, still searching how to remove it.
    That’s all, the rest of the upgrade went just fine.

    • Thanks for the feedback. Note that Fedora can’t individually test every combination of software. It’s probably not helpful to use the Magazine to report specific package issues. Check with your repo providers, or if for some reason you find a probelm with upgrading on a package Fedora offers, report it to Bugzilla.

      • Peter Braet

        Thank you. Went to the “spins” and installed the Design workstation. I broke to many Linux with multimedia experiments, so no real bugs to report

    • Matthew Bunt

      libdvdcss has moved to rpmfusion-free-tainted

    • badbanana

      i’m just curious. you can’t use VLC to watch DVD movies?

      • someone

        you can. but you have to install libdvdcss. To do this you have to enable another repo.
        If you wanna have it simple, download the flatpaked vlc from flathub. This one can play dvd’s without issus and without having to install some other packages

    • Daniel B

      It looks like libdvdcss moved to rpmfusion-free-tainted. You’ll have to make sure the rpmfusion-free-release-tainted package is installed from RPM Fusion first, then install libdvdcss afterwards.

  5. Sven

    After upgrading from 27 I first could not login using the gnome login. Logging in via commandline and using startx works, though.

    After another reboot I got presented the welcome dialog where I now should add a new user. Has anyone an idea what went wrong?

    • Veddie

      I also had this problem (or a very similar one). I had to login via the console and clear all the GNOME configuration for my user. I couldn’t narrow it down because I needed a working desktop quickly.

      I then ran into a problem where I couldn’t launch gnome-terminal due to a missing glibc locale pack (it’s already been reported, and closed due to insufficient data: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1570924).

      I also ran into a couple of crashes in GNOME Tweaks and Software. All in all, this was the most troublesome Fedora upgrade I’ve had in quite some time.

      • Roelof

        Many thanks for this reply. I had exactly the same, Terminal did not start anymore after updating to Fedora 28. Installed the appropriate glibc-langpack and now it works again!

        • Xtremlylazy

          After some try, I discovered the problem in upgrading my fedora: in fstab there was a virtual drive mounted to replicate my google drive repo. Removing that line the system booted again.

    • Just updated, and like you I can’t log in with my login. It return to dialog box 🙁
      I’ve a second account on my Fedora and log in with success.
      If I try with startx, it failed too.

    • Just see this bugzilla, and test disable gnome shell user extension with success.

      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1573683

      Have to figure out wich doesn’t support new gnome.

    • Raj

      I too had the same problem. After upgrade from 27 and reboot, it gave me a terminal. No desktop environment. I installed KDE from command line and startx. Worked for couple of reboots and then KDE also stopped working. I tried, gnome-shell-extension removal also. No luck for me. There is a serious problem in f28 which gets triggered only on certain conditions. I could see same problem being reported by many who is upgrading from f27.

      Finally, i had to take backup and start with f28 iso. So far so good. This is the worst upgrade every provided by fedora.

  6. Charlie

    Would you all anticipate any issues going F26 straight to F28 skipping F27? And, would the method documented above fork for that scenario?

    Thanks!

    • badbanana

      in any OS i upgrade, i find resolving any pending issues, updating the current OS helps alot when an upgrade is being done. of course, ymmv

    • Kjetil BM

      I just did this, and I have 3 major issues: 1) the grub boot is not updated, so the new 28 kernel is not listed. 2) There is a problem with language, so my international keyboard/settintg does not work in terminal, special characters are shown as question marks. So I am not able to do any su’ing 🙁 And 3) “logging out” actually puts computer into hibernate also, having to manually push the power button to get logon screen back. Never seen so many hickups in an upgrade! I have jumped upgrades before without similar issues.

  7. Ivan R

    Worked flawlessly

  8. Ralf Oltmanns

    In case you have “broken” packages preventing you to upgrade and you’d like to circumvent it (by removing it), you need to use
    sudo dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=28
    sudo dnf system-upgrade download –releasever 28 ‐‐allowerasing
    as the former command will fail stating that the argument ‘‐‐allowerasing’ is not recognized. But the error output was very helpful.

    • Isaque Galdino

      Don’t copy –allowerasing from this blog page, it won’t work, just type it in the command line.
      Something is wrong with the way this page renders it!

    • KHerb

      –allowerasing is positional dependend.

      sudo dnf system-upgrade –allowerasing –releasever=28 download

      did the trick for me.

  9. Bruno

    Running much better, the graphics are much more smooth than the 27 on my Asus Zenbook UX330U.

  10. Smooth upgrade from Fedora 27.

    Good job!

  11. Cris

    Hi.
    I have installed 28, but I can not watch videos. Even on Firefox, Chromium, Vivaldi.

  12. Meomao

    Only for GNOME or also for KDE? Because, I get a message what says that the distro is not ready to upgrade. I’m on Fedora 27 + KDE latest version.

  13. S.Rodney

    On my MSI GX70 Destroyer laptop, when I initiate the upgrade in the Software Center, the download progress bar keeps resetting when it gets at about 10% progression. I’ve tried letting it go but hours later, still exhibits the same loop.

    It did work on my workstation.

    Since I used dnf to update my server, I’ll try the same with the laptop

  14. DanielP

    If the computer is tight with free disk space, before upgrading it is good to remove some big self-contained packages (like Libreoffice), which can be manually reinstalled after the upgrade.

  15. zyga

    After upgrade from 27 and reboot, my fedora 28 i386 doesn’t work. Only small logo is displayed in the middle.
    I tried another method – fresh install. The same.
    I waited 20 minutes.
    Overall boot proces is very slow.

    • Alex Villacis

      Is your situation similar to the bug I reported?

      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1575194

      I had to work around it by booting into a text login, then disabling Wayland in /etc/gdm/custom.conf . This assumes you are using GDM as login manager, and that your laptop previously ran Wayland Gnome Shell without issue.

      • zyga

        After new installation, (all filesystems formatted) i have the same.

  16. Niklas Sommer

    after:

    sudo dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=28 –allowerasing

    i get:

    Fehler bei der Transaktionsüberprüfung:
    Datei /usr/lib64/nemo/extensions-3.0/libnemo-python.so aus der Installation von python2-nemo-3.6.0-4.fc28.x86_64 kollidiert mit der Datei aus dem Paket nemo-python-3.6.0-2.fc27.x86_64

    it refuses to update

  17. Tquilha

    Upgrade went super smoothly, and F28 is running like clockwork.
    Very nice!

  18. Alexander

    Hi,
    First of all, you for all the effort you put into Fedora and congratulations on the new release.

    I’m sorry to say that it didn’t worked on my Lenovo Legion.
    I tried upgrading from f27 to f28 and when I tried to login, gnome-shell crashed with Wayland. I thought it was a SELinux issue so I relabeled the system, and nothing changed.
    I switched to Xorg and I got a CPU soft lockup.
    I installed xfce, I was able to login once (without rebooting) and then it happened again.
    (I did all of this from tty2)

    I downloaded the ISO, did a fresh install and I got the CPU soft lockup again.
    I don’t really have time to troubleshoot, so I don’t think I’ll be using this release.

    Despite all of that, Fedora is still my 1st choice of distro. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

    Thanks again for your work.

    • Johan Westerduin

      Exact same thing Asus ksptop

  19. Zufin

    Hangs at the very end on “running scriptlets kernel-core…”.

  20. Adam

    Can i upgrading with live usb?

  21. Hi,

    after update i got problems with my locale settings. Everything should be de_DE.UTF-8 bot when i start e.g gnome-terminal i get the error:

    Locale not supported by C library

    On the desktop i havea mixure of english and german.

    any ideas?

    Thx,

    Maurice

    • Problem solved by: dnf install glibc-langpack-de
      Seems that this package was not updated somehow.

      Hope it helps others,

      Maurice

      • Jacek

        Thank you Maurice! You’ve saved my day!
        Solution in my case: dnf install glibc-langpack-pl

        I was not able to login using Login Screen with GNOME, when I entered password, and then pressed enter, I was returned to Login Screen again. I was able to login using KDE Plasma.

        For me disabling GNOME Shell User Extensions was not a solution, based on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1573683

        Jacek

      • Jan de Boer

        Thank you, that did it, also for .nl

  22. Ananda Amatya

    Unable to upgrade:
    Success in downloading packages after running the command:

    $ sudo dnf system-upgrade download –allowerasing –releasever=28

    Unfortunately there was error:

    Error: Transaction check error:
    file /boot/efi/EFI/fedora from install of grub2-common-1:2.02-34.fc28.noarch conflicts with file from package fwupdate-efi-8-4.fc26.i686

    Shall appreciate help.

    Error Summary

  23. ilikelinux

    Thx for the tutorial. Cleaning up the grub entry(s) i made the following:

    dnf install yum-utils
    package-cleanup --oldkernels --count=2
  24. I had an older model HP AIO workstation that would not boot properly from Fedora 28 LXQT USB media… I had tried to recreate media and several other options, (Gnome, Cinnamon, and KDE versions would boot), but installing 27 LXQT worked great. The upgrade following this process was also flawless.

  25. Luke

    Errore:
    Problema: nss-pem-1.0.3-6.fc27.i686 has inferior architecture
    – nss-pem-1.0.3-6.fc27.x86_64 does not belong to a distupgrade repository
    – problem with installed package nss-pem-1.0.3-6.fc27.i686

  26. Tried Commandline:

    Error:
    Problem 1: nss-pem-1.0.3-6.fc27.i686 has inferior architecture
    – nss-pem-1.0.3-6.fc27.x86_64 does not belong to a distupgrade repository
    – problem with installed package nss-pem-1.0.3-6.fc27.i686
    Problem 2: problem with installed package pywebkitgtk-1.1.8-13.fc26.x86_64
    – package pywebkitgtk-1.1.8-13.fc26.x86_64 requires libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0.so.0()(64bit), but none of the providers can be installed
    – gnucash-2.6.21-1.fc27.x86_64 does not belong to a distupgrade repository
    Problem 3: package variety-0.6.7-2.fc28.noarch requires pywebkitgtk, but none of the providers can be installed
    – package pywebkitgtk-1.1.8-13.fc26.x86_64 requires libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0.so.0()(64bit), but none of the providers can be installed
    – problem with installed package variety-0.6.6-1.fc27.noarch
    – package gnucash-2.6.21-1.fc27.x86_64 requires libgwengui-gtk2.so.0()(64bit), but none of the providers can be installed
    – variety-0.6.6-1.fc27.noarch does not belong to a distupgrade repository
    – gwenhywfar-gui-gtk2-4.15.3-9.fc27.x86_64 does not belong to a distupgrade repository

    • rrr

      dnf install nss-pem-1.0.3-9.fc28 –releasever=28

  27. Andrew

    annoying when upgrades write over config files. Luckily, sshd_config was unaffected this time, but my nginx configs got a bit messed up. issue.net got overwritten as well.

  28. Everything works! Thank you!

  29. Shelmed

    Yet another flawless upgrade for me…gone from 26 to 27 and now 28 all via dnf upgrade – Great work Fedora team and community – Much appreciated 🙂

  30. Khudair

    Hi, I did an upgrade for Fedora from 27 to 28, and after all the steps were completed without any error, the system was restarted and the user interface was down, I could not access the system after setting the password

    • Rj

      I also have this issue with a x86_64 system. I am able to use ctrl-alt-F2 to get into a termainal there and then log in and from there startx in tty2… but the screen saver will not operate now will hte power saving mode… unable to get to the standard grahical login screen on boot 🙁

      • kadja

        The same here.
        Deleting .local or .config doesn’t help.

        I also notice high drive transfer (procs : dnf, tracker) after trying graphical login (everyday).

  31. Akinsola

    Quite helpful and straightforward

  32. h0neybadger

    if you copy paste the “–allowerasing” from this webpage, then you may have the issue

    [h0neybadger@laptop ~]$ echo ‘‐‐allowerasing’ | hexdump -C
    00000000 e2 80 90 e2 80 90 61 6c 6c 6f 77 65 72 61 73 69 |……allowerasi|
    00000010 6e 67 0a |ng.|
    00000013
    [h0neybadger@laptop ~]$ echo ‘–allowerasing’ | hexdump -C
    00000000 2d 2d 61 6c 6c 6f 77 65 72 61 73 69 6e 67 0a |–allowerasing.|
    0000000f

  33. Bobby Rong

    As the directory structure of [updates] [updates-debuginfo] [updates-source] in Fedora 28 changed, I hope the editor may add a note in order to notify users who use “baseurl” instead of “metalink”:
    Adding “Everything/” after “updates/$releasever/” in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo (or something like that) before using “dnf system-upgrade” is needed, even if you choose the official repository download.fedoraproject.org, or you will unable to do the upgrade.

    • Philip

      Thank you very much for pointing this out!

  34. Robert Stevens

    Upgrade worked very well i had to use the ‐‐allowerasing switch to get it to happen.

    I was worried about the change to the nvidia driver package manager but the RPM fusion Nvidia driver didnt have any issues with the upgrade.

    Virtual box and all machines worked perfectly after install as did Steam and CSGO.

    All Mozzila and email client data was intact including extensions

    Not a huge fan of the new desktop pic but all in all well done to the fedora team..

    • kadja

      Such new desktop pic is here to mention that you are running a new version of fedora I presume, because each release has its own.

      To add your own or past picture :
      right click on the gnome-shell desktop -> change background.

  35. Peter

    Why did Fedora 28 remove the waterfall picture that I used as my desktop background? I thought the installation had gone wrong because my desktop was just a white screen after the upgrade. I have now picked a different picture, but I really liked that waterfall photo. Can you bring it back?

  36. Worked very well again. Successfully upgrading the same installation since Fedora 19 o/

  37. Engarde

    Having followed the steps yesterday I found that at the reboot step, having provided my encrypted drive password, that I get to the f logo, or rather that hangs around for a while and I get an unresponsive blank screen with a non-moving mouse cursor.
    Same result if I try the previous two f27 images.

    • Engarde

      Tried disabling selinux in my grub by editting it no effect.
      Tried using the emergency logon and see that if I immediately give the root password that it tells me a selinux targetted policy relabel is required.

  38. Engarde

    … by that I mean if I select the two most recent f27 kernels in my grub menu, they also get to the f logo/blank screen – I never get prompted for a user/pwd, and I left it for several hours

  39. Engarde

    Having allowed the selinux policy change to be applied, system rebooted (in my absence) and back to the same hang spot. I’ve not had the chance to try the emergency logon and see if anything else is happening.

    • Engarde

      Having used the emergency logon again this time without the selinux policy kicking in, journalctl shows a file not found in relation to dbus. Still not clear what the issue is here.

  40. Nick

    Thanks.
    During last two weeks upgraded from fedora 18 right up to Fedora 28 with no problems.

    Initially with Fedup then dnf System Upgrade.

  41. Tom Bouwman

    Just upgraded my server from 27 to 28, using the commands from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade as I always do.
    Success and no issues at all.
    Only need to figure out some *.conf.rpmnew files with the current versions.
    That should be no issue at all.

  42. Sunil

    Just tried upgrading from rel 27 to 28 and i get this error:

    Error: Transaction check error:
    file /usr/lib64/nemo/extensions-3.0/libnemo-python.so from install of python2-nemo-3.6.0-4.fc28.x86_64 conflicts with file from package nemo-python-3.6.0-2.fc27.x86_64

    I re-tried with the –alowerasing option and it didnt make a difference. Same result.

    Can i just remove the older nemo-python file ? which would make my python env unusable, im assuming.

    Any ides on how to resolve?

  43. Lluís Riera

    After upgrading from 27 to 28
    1.-Gnome failed !!
    2.-Gnome Classic failed !!
    3.-Plasma KDE worked pretty well. I can log in and work.
    Could be nvidia, Xorg, wayland,…..who knows. I’m lost and a little upset.
    Locale fails and so on…

  44. AuldChris

    Have used CLI upgrade process since fedup days. Tried unsuccessfully since F28 was released to upgrade via CLI. As penultimate resort tried the GUI route. Success!

  45. Xtremlylazy

    upgrade seemed flawless, but after rebooting the system shows the CLI. I have no idea how to investigate the error. the journalctl -xb command shows severla lines I don’t know where to look

  46. Steven

    Just upgraded 3 systems, both workstation and server, smoothly and successfully (just space issues and a few entangled dependencies on one the systems, nothing –allowerasing cannot fix) Everything is working fine.

    btw, been upgrading since the last 2 years or more using this very same process. No issues. Works as expected.

    A BIG congrats guys. You rock

  47. isuru sampath

    That’s Awesome
    Now I Will Update Fedora 27 to 28

  48. Juan Miguel

    After the “dnf upgrade –allowerasing” completes the system boots, but no logon screen anymore, no gdm, etc, why?? in this case, very simple…
    Executing the command “journalctl -rxb -g gnome” tell me this,(of course, a problem with my nvidia card and the drivers…;-)):

    SELinux is preventing gnome-session-c from map access on the chr_file /dev/nvidiactl.

    The above command (-x option)give us the solution:

    If you believe that gnome-session-c should be allowed map access on the nvidiactl chr_file >
    Then you should report this as a bug.
    You can generate a local policy module to allow this access.
    Do
    allow this access for now by executing:
    # ausearch -c ‘gnome-session-c’ –raw | audit2allow -M my-gnomesessionc
    # semodule -X 300 -i my-gnomesessionc.pp

    And voilá, everything works fine again…
    I hope this helps anybody

  49. Juan Miguel

    First of all, thank all the Fedora team for the great work done in our distribution, great!!

    All right, after executing “dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=28 –alloerasing”, my system boots…but no logon screen, only grey screen with the classic “x” like a mouse.
    Also, trying ctrl+alt+F[AnyNumber] to access TTY didn`t work because the loading system was waiting the load of gnome system.
    Thanks to ssh I could execute “journalctl -rxb -g gnome” and see the following:

    may 26 12:06:16 fedora-clevo setroubleshoot[2251]: SELinux is preventing gnome-session-c from map access on the chr_file /dev/nvidiactl>
    may 26 12:06:13 fedora-clevo abrt-notification[2190]: Process 1926 (gnome-session-check-accelerated-gles-helper) crashed in ??()

    The above journalctl command, in this case(-x option), give us the solution:

    may 26 12:06:16 fedora-clevo python3[2251]: SELinux is preventing gnome-session-c from map access on the chr_file /dev/nvidiactl.

                                            *****  Plugin catchall (100. confidence) suggests   **************************

                                            If you believe that gnome-session-c should be allowed map access on the nvidiactl chr_file >
                                            Then you should report this as a bug.
                                            You can generate a local policy module to allow this access.
                                            Do
                                            allow this access for now by executing:
                                            # ausearch -c 'gnome-session-c' --raw | audit2allow -M my-gnomesessionc
                                            # semodule -X 300 -i my-gnomesessionc.pp

    After execute the above commands(and reboot..), voilá, everything works fine again.

    I like Fedora and I like the Nvidia drivers, but sometimes they give us the odd headache, 🙂

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