Automatic update

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, John Summerfied wrote:

> Anthony Messina wrote:
>
> -pmr
>>> 
>> yum has a service for nightly update in fc4 (and maybe others). why don't 
>> you edit the associated scripts to only download the packages, not install 
>> them?  that would be the identical behavior that ms allows, or you could 
>> choose to have them automatically applied by just enabling the current 
>> service.  as another writer mentioned, you kernel is never updated per se. 
>> the new one is just installed and /etc/grub.conf is changed to boot into 
>> the new one, but your old kernel stays safe and sound.
>
> Making the new one bootable is certain to create a system that will not boot, 
> shutdown or fail in some other way without manual intervention. It happened 
> several times during the life of FC3 to my certain knowledge, I believe it 
> happened to many with FC4 and it almost certainly will happen during the life 
> of FC5.
>
> Installing new kernels is fine. Automatically making them bootable is not, 
> and that's not taking into account those who wish to boot something 
> altogether different, such as Windows, FreeBSD or Another Distro.

This behavior is controllable via /etc/sysconfig/kernel.  One of mine 
contains:

     # UPDATEDEFAULT specifies if new-kernel-pkg should make
     # new kernels the default
     UPDATEDEFAULT=yes

     # DEFAULTKERNEL specifies the default kernel package type
     DEFAULTKERNEL=kernel

So if you want new kernels to not be made the default, change 
UPDATEDEFAULT to no.  Then the new kernel is installed alongside the 
old one, but the old one remains the default.  (Can ya do that with 
Windows?)

I've never tried it, but it wouldn't be too surprising if when the default 
kernel isn't Linux, it isn't overridden.  In any case, the above change 
would take care of the problem.

>
> New kernels will mostly work for most; many had problems with FC3 kernels and 
> USB. New hardware (mobos, SCSI, yoy name it) is likely to give grief. People 
> who must build their own wireless or infernal modem drivers are adversely 
> affected. I rebuild to include NTFS so I need the source, not the binaries 
> while others download the NTFS binaries.

There are RPMs for NTFS that contain those modules, but they aren't part 
of FC or FE so it's in fact not clear whether they would be ready to be 
picked up when the kernels are released.  Usually the nvidia kernel 
modules at Livna take a day or so to appear.

I need to rebuild the initrd for my laptop kernel, so I usually install 
updated kernels by hand.  I wish they'd fix that, but that's another 
thread.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs