Updating Fedora Again

2008 June 25 at 08:51 » Tagged as :

The Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 migration, which I blogged about in recent days was on what I like to call my media server. It's a core 2 duo machine that runs mythtv and also functions as a backup server. I regularly backup my macbook and my desktop onto it.

The desktop is an old Pentium 4 2Ghz that still runs Fedora Core 6 which redface had long since marked as obsolete. I decided to update that to Fedora 9 as was but was loath to download the DVD iso again (the ISO i had downloaded is the 64 bit version, this machine obviously needs the 32 bit version)

The next best thing seems to be to try to do a live update with yum; In order to do that, you have to change all the repositories in yum.repos.d to version reflect the desired version number (9) and then run yum update. I tried to make life easier for the installer by creating a local repository out of the 64 bit DVD (it contains more than a 1000 files which are either ,noarch or .i386)

Having the local repository didn't do much good. The update process seemed to take forever just to sort out the package dependencies. I initially tried yum update and soon gave up on it. Then I tried yum update yum. That seemed like it would take just as long.

Even with an update that should have very few dependencies it gets stuck. That's because many apps are linked against either expat (xml libraries), python, ssl or glibc. Updating one of them would mean countless RPMs have to be updated and if one rpm has expat as a dependency, another one of it's dependencies is sure to have glibc so it starts an avalanche. ll this without downloading a single RPM.

After this experience I am not surprised that redface themselves advice against live updates. There must surely be a better way. Yes there is ; jigdo.