about hardware information

Kevin J. Cummings cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
Sun Sep 30 00:16:59 UTC 2007


Kam Leo wrote:
> I do not subscribe to the fedora-announce list.
>
> Well, someone at Unity finally updated the web page. I clicked on the
> Unity spins link and found a page with the following:
> 
> "Fedora Unity Re-Spin 20070912 — by jon — last modified Sep 28, 2007 02:09 PM
> This is the jigdo for the 20070912 i386, x86_64 and source DVDs plus
> the i386 and x86_64 CD sets."
> 
> Can you tell from the description that the re-spin is for F7? I
> couldn't. I had to click on "Fedora Unity Re-Spin 20070912" to find
> out.
> 
> Personally, I would not use this jigdo link. Here's why:
> 
> http://spins.fedoraunity.org/unity/fedora-unity-7-20070912.jigdo/at_download/file
> "This is the jigdo for the 20070912 i386, x86_64 and source DVDs plus
> the i386 and x86_64 CD sets."
> 
> If I recall correctly using this jigdo file would be a whole hog or
> nothing proposition.They could have created jigdo files for subsets of
> the re-spin, e.g. i386 DVD, x86_64 DVD, i386 CD set, etc.

If you haven't used jigdo before, please don't complain about how it
works badly.  I just used it (for the first time) to build the i386 and
x86_64 DVDs.  Each builds, one at a time.  I used the original F7 ISOs
as a starting point, mounted them on my system, and ran jigdo, selected
the i386 ISO, pointed it at my mounted i386 DVD, and let it run.  It
took about 2 hours to download the 560 some changed RPMs, and created a
new ISO image for me.  *THEN* I was able to select the x86_64 DVD, and
do the same thing for the almost 800 RPMs.  I let this one run and some
3 hours later, I burned it as well.  (Was there some overlap of the
changed RPMs between the 2?  probably, its not perfect, and doesn't
remember what was already downloaded for a previous disk.  Could it
have?  Maybe, I'm not sure, I haven't used it enough to proclaim myself
an expert in it.)  What I *did* find lacking was the documentation.  It
was written by people who had been using it probably for some time, and
while it did a good job of telling you what dependencies you needed
installed, it did a lousy job of showing you examples of running it.  I
guess its par for the course today where everyone who writes new
programs just assumes you'll just jump in and run it and figure it all
out on your own.  But, that's my experience with it.

Would a torrent have done just as well?  Maybe, but it would've
downloaded the entire 2.9 and 3.4 GB ISO images for both, not just the
changed RPMs.

Did I build any of the other 14 or so options?  No, but interestingly
enough, 5 CD sets were some of the choices, as were the SRPMS.  I didn't
want them, I didn't have to download them.

The .jigdo file isn't much more than a structured text file listing the
RPM contents of each disk.  Comparing this list to a local repo
structure allows it to figure out what's changed and only download those
changed RPMs and rebuilds the ISO, then verifies the result against a
known good checksum.

> There is still no link on the Unity site to
> http://fedora.kanarip.com/torrents/ just to the official Fedora
> torrents.
> 
> Anyone know if a torrent is available for this re-spin?

Given how jigdo works, I don't think they plan on ever providing one.
If all their server has to do is serve up the much smaller .jigdo file,
and then put the entire download load on the updates mirrors.  You are
free to edit your .jigdo files to specify whatever mirrors you wish to
choose to, or use the default list they provide.  My experience is that
the default servers weren't as fast as some of the ones tried for the
"missing" RPMs after the first pass.  But I had no way of knowing that
up front.

Of course, YMMV

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)




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