Fedora 13 was released yesterday and I’ve decided to take the plunge on the laptop and upgrade it from Fedora 12. After I kick the tires for a bit I’ll upgrade my desktop.
The last time I did this I was frustrated that I had to download all of the packages twice, once for each system. This time around I decided to fix that. I discovered this page that talks about various methods of caching the download after the first time. My initial thought was to use the “rsync /var/cache/yum and keepcache=1” approach as it’s by far the easiest to implement. The problem is that the IBM script that wraps around preupgrade to make sure that all the IBM pieces get upgraded/added properly has a nasty habit of ‘yum clean all’ing at inconvenient times if you need to restart preupgrade which would clear the cache (yes that’s a defect, they don’t seem interested in fixing it).
So instead I thought I’d go with just the ‘Squid with cache’ route. That doesn’t work nearly as well as one would hope due to all the various mirrors that could be used. The raw Squid cache might work well for a large organization but doesn’t hack it for what I want.
I ended up with the ‘Squid with IntelligentMirror‘ approach which seems to be working well so far. The RPMs are still being downloaded onto the laptop but I’ve validated they’re correctly being stored on the desktop so when I get ready to upgrade it, the process should be significantly faster.
As a reminder to myself: use the intelligentmirror-0.5 package and not the intelligentmirror-1.0.1 package, despite what this file says. The 1.0.1 package just serves up the pre-cached files but doesn’t actually do the caching.
Digital Ramblings 
I think it’s funny that you’re kicking the tires on your laptop. Laptop drivers tend to be much more finicky than desktop drivers, so I tend to try to stuff out in a VM (very stable set of hardware), then on a desktop (almost always solid support), then maybe on a laptop (where I expect things like power management may be completely broken).
OF course, at this point I’m probably not turning away from my Mac anytime soon.. having everything “just work” and also having unixy stuff underneath is so nice.
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Well, I only use my laptop when traveling whereas I use my desktop day in and day out — so if something has to be broken I’d prefer it to be the laptop. Besides, the old T60p’s are far from bleeding edge so I expect the support to be pretty good.
IBM is slowly replacing their T60p’s. If they won’t let me swap to a Mac on their dime I may just do so of my own volition.
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Call me
Casey, you did work for me at my past jobs and I need your help. Please call me at 303-903-8098. Sorry I have lost all contact information for you
Thanks Janet
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I haven’t tried Red Hat in years, but just rolled a new machine with Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and am really impressed by how smooth the whole process has become in the recent years. Everything that’s been a complicated in the past–my strange display configuration (dual landscape widescreens stacked vertically), my OS-on-SSD-/home-on-platters scheme, my obscure peripherals…with the exception of a microphone capture bug, everything “just worked”, and even that was fixed instantly with a patch.
Another cycle or two like this and I’ll feel comfortable migrating my Mom from Windows. :)
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Very nice indeed I’ll probably download it. Thanks.
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