Fedora 10 Live Update vs Jigdo Download.

The other day, I spoke about upgrading from Fedora 9 to 10 using YUM. The reason that I chose this approach was because I wasn't keen to watch while Azureus or Jigdo painstakingly downloaded the DVD bit by bit. The DVD contains a lot of useful software and it also contains loads of software which I have absolutely no need for.

Jigdo scores over torrents because it can skip any RPMs that are common to the new version and the old. Of course it would be more civic minded to use a torrent. In my case, I will be installing Fedora on two machines of my own and I will be sharing with quite a few others as well. Mostly these are are people forced to suffer with 512Kb DSL links. Even without using torrents, I am doing my bit to spread the love.

The reason that I opted for a live update instead of jigdo is because only 7 of the 2800+ files shipped on the DVD are shared between 9 and 10. That means the whole DVD has to be downloaded and even at 2Mbps that would take a bit too long for my liking. The reason that the two versions have so few files in common might be due to the fact that the digital certificates used to sign the RPMs has changed.

Live updates isn't easy but it's more fun. If you first try it out using a virtual machine, there is no risk of a half cooked upgrade or any data loss. But after doing the live update, I decided to download the ISO and do it the proper way after all. The RPMs downloaded for the live update can be used by Jigdo (it did make use of about 200 of them). That still left more than 2500 files to be downloaded and it was painstakingly slow. Though I have had a spot of bother with my broadband connection of late, this time the slow down is probably because the mirrors are under a heavy strain.

The initial download was for the 32 bit version - I need it to use the Sun Java Plugin - they still haven't got around to creating a 64 bit version for Linux. How lame is that?. The 32 bit fedora will only run as a guest. When that jigsawed download was reassembled it was time to get the 64 bit version. This time around Jigdo found 1200 rpms from the earlier download that it liked.