Red Hat Topics - [newbie] up2date alternative on Fedora Core 4?

Author

[newbie] up2date alternative on Fedora Core 4?

Christoph

2006-03-09, 7:47 am

I've got Fedora Core installed on a P3 500mhz with 256mb of ram. I
installed FC4 on one of my old boxes because I wanted to start learning
Linux. The install went without a hitch and after I got everything
configured, I ran up2date which also ran w/o a hitch. That was about 7 or
8mos ago and due to other pressing real life issues (I live outside of New
Orleans), I've only now been able to start fooling around with it again.

So I run up2date again to ensure that my system is, well, up to date with
all the packages. Going through the various dialogues, I tell it to update
all the packages. It seems I have to because if I don't select all then the
forward button is greyed out. So after I select all and click forward, it
starts to download the packages. The first weird thing I see is that every
package gives a warning saying that it doesn't have GPG signature and asks
if I want to continue. I indicate that I do for every package. It must
have been over 50 times I had to do so.

Except for the warning, it seems to download every package fine and, once
finished, I click forward. At that point, it gets to the installing
packages dialogue and then it just hangs. I see the HD light flashing but
there doesn't seem to be any kind of progression on the install window. So
I let it sit there for a few hours and come back. The install dialogue is
gone with no message indicating success or failure. So I run up2date again
and go through the entire process again as above. The only difference this
time is that for each package, it says that it's already downloaded. It
still gives me the warning, however. When it gets to the install dialogue,
again it just sits there. There is no indication (within up2date or
elsewhere) that my system has been updated.

Basically, my questions are:

* Does anyone know what is going on with my up2date? Why mightn't it be
working as it should?

* Is there an alternative to up2date that I can use to make sure my system
has the latest packages installed?

thnx,
Christoph

Some Other Somebody Else

2006-03-09, 5:47 pm

On Thu, 9 Mar 2006 07:32:56 -0600, "Christoph" <jcboget@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>[...]Basically, my questions are:
>
>* Does anyone know what is going on with my up2date? Why mightn't it be
>working as it should?
>
>* Is there an alternative to up2date that I can use to make sure my system
>has the latest packages installed?
>
>thnx,
>Christoph

I've seen a number of threads in other places where it was said that
the rhn-based system for FC4 was hosed and would not be fixed, that
people would just have to wait for FC5 (although last I checked it
worked on earlier Fedora releases, as well as CentOS). I can't claim
that that information is authoritative though; it seems kind of dumb
on its face not to implement some more or less usable kludge to do
whatever CentOS and the other Fedora releases are doing to keep that
working, but I don't know what the developers are dealing with in that
department.

Anyway, the command line programs apt and yum can both keep the system
up to date, and there are graphical front ends available. Yum can
easily be configured to run every night automatically; I'm using that
now and haven't seen any problems with it - look for "yum" in Red
Hat's service configuration program, or just run "chkconfig --level
345 yum on" as root; that sets it to run every night.

General Schvantzkoph

2006-03-09, 5:47 pm

Use yumex instead of up2date. Yumex is a huge step forward over up2date.
Up2date is a piece of dog crap. Yumex is a piece of horse crap, which is
an improvement over dog crap, it still smells but not as badly.

Ideally you would be able to just do a yum -y update and that would be
sufficient to update your system. Unfortunately that doesn't work all of
the time and it never works in circumstances like yours where the system
is 8 months out of date. The problem is that if you are updating several
hundred packages and there is a problem with even a single one, the whole
update fails and not a single package will get updated. As far as I know
there is no switch which tells yum to update everything it can and ignore
the few packages that it can't handle (I'd be delighted to hear that I'm
wrong about this). That's leaves the manual method which is going to take
you hours. What you need to do is bring up Yumex. Then you select a couple
of dozen packages from the update list and do an update on them. If that
succeeds you can do some more. If a package fails then you'll have to
unselect it and try do update the rest. Eventually you'll get down to a
bunch of packages that have unresolvable dependencies. The way around this
is to uninstall the packages that cause the conflicts, and then reinstall
them.

Ivan Marsh

2006-03-09, 5:47 pm

On Thu, 09 Mar 2006 15:02:59 -0500, General Schvantzkoph wrote:

> Use yumex instead of up2date. Yumex is a huge step forward over up2date.
> Up2date is a piece of dog crap. Yumex is a piece of horse crap, which is
> an improvement over dog crap, it still smells but not as badly.

Stop using all those scientific terms.

> Ideally you would be able to just do a yum -y update and that would be
> sufficient to update your system.

You can.

> Unfortunately that doesn't work all of the time and it never works in
> circumstances like yours where the system is 8 months out of date.

Never had trouble with this myself.

--
The USA Patriot Act is the most unpatriotic act in American history.

General Schvantzkoph

2006-03-09, 5:47 pm

On Thu, 09 Mar 2006 15:19:21 -0600, Ivan Marsh wrote:

> On Thu, 09 Mar 2006 15:02:59 -0500, General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>
>
>
> Stop using all those scientific terms.
>
>
> You can.
>
>
> Never had trouble with this myself.

You've been lucky. This happens to me all the time. When I do a fresh FC4
installation now I'm very careful to do a minimum install, no apps except
Emacs, and no Gnome. I then use yumex to install Gnome and everything else
I need, that way I start with a clean set of current packages.

Scott Lurndal

2006-03-09, 5:47 pm

In article <pan.2006.03.09.23.04.54.671571@yahoo.com>,
General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:
>On Thu, 09 Mar 2006 15:19:21 -0600, Ivan Marsh wrote:
>
>
>You've been lucky. This happens to me all the time. When I do a fresh FC4
>installation now I'm very careful to do a minimum install, no apps except
>Emacs, and no Gnome. I then use yumex to install Gnome and everything else
>I need, that way I start with a clean set of current packages.
>
>

I select "everything" during install. Just did that last week on a
new system, with FC4 (x86_64). Did a yum update immediately after
the firstboot; two packages of the 700 or so (both GFS related) failed
the upgrade, so I did a yum list update, edited out the two GFS lines,
then fed the result back into yum update $(cat list). Worked like a
champ.

scott