ok, laptops loaded up and ready for testing

David dgboles at comcast.net
Thu Mar 5 17:56:52 UTC 2009


On 3/5/2009 12:25 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Mar 2009, David wrote:

>> The way the update works is that *all*, you said 1500, packages
>> would be downloaded, then installed, and then the cleanup would
>> begin. That would take a lot of disk space with the potential to
>> fail at any stage.

>   that's probably why, after updating *only* rpm* and yum, the first
> thing i did was install the downloadonly plugin, then "yum update
> --downloadonly", wait ... wait ... wait ... then burn all those
> packages to DVD before going any further.  just to save time the next
> time.

>   oh, and i set "keepcache=1".  just playing it safe.


A good idea there. That will avoid most of the 'downloading again'
should things go south. An 'update' in a few days would only be recent
changes. It is not uncommon for there to be 50, or so, packages a day.
It all depends on how much of what you have installed.


>> For the 64bit you would get *all* of the i386 now i586 packages
>> install and all of the 64bit packages that have changed. And Rawhide
>> changes a lot every day.

>   i understand that.  it still brings us back to the same issue --
> should i *expect* "yum update" to just work, even with rawhide?  as
> in, should i expect it not to totally hose my system to the point
> where i have to re-install from scratch?


I would. I have, as a time with nothing to do thing, installed a
release. Updated it to current. And then 'changed' it to Rawhide and
updated it then. And I had not problems.


>> Someone posted a script a while back, might have been here, that was
>> supposed to help someone with a disk space problem by doing the update a
>> little at a time. IIRC it was for a release upgrade but I don't see why
>> it would not work here.

>   i have buckets of disk space -- i accepted the default disk
> partitioning so i have one honking big root filesystem (>80G).  disk
> space is not an issue.


You had said 'laptop' and they are noted to not have large harddrives.
It sounds as if you will not have that problem.


>> And I would do this in level 3 and not in the GUI level 5. Less
>> things to go wrong that way.

>> You do know how to get to level three?

>   yes, dear ... i've done it a time or two in my day.  :-)


Sorry. Did not mean to be condescending.  ;-)  I have seen many
'experts' that only thought that they were experts. Many who were great
with a GUI to look at and lost at the CLI. There was a thread a while
back that had a 'many years of experience' guy that could not maintain
his network because he could not log into the GUI as root. He could
have. If he had that much experience.  :-)


> rday
> --

> p.s.  still waiting for suggestions as to what to do first if anyone
> wants to see the current state of the systems before i bork them
> totally.  or i'll just start things rolling and you'll hear the angry
> shrieking at some point later this afternoon.


I don't know about the bork part. I really do believe that most
'problems' are self inflicted. Third party site packages is a big one.
Odd hardware is another big one. By 'odd' I mean not well supported.

Good luck.
-- 


  David




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