[Dextrose] upgrading XOs

[David Farning]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Gary Martin <garycmartin at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 28 Oct 2010, at 02:09, David Farning <dfarning at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> At the risk of sounding really stupid....
>>
>> When upgrading to dextrose why don't we use 'yum update' to update the
>> the core sugar package?  That seems simpler then carrying around a usb
>> stick and disrupting class.
>
> If you have a good high bandwidth connection to the mirrors, and not many machines to upgrade, it may be possible (remember even just running the first yum will trigger 15-25Mb of package index to be downloaded). However I find anything more than a trivial yum will lock up an XO-1, or fail part way due to lack of swap space; example 1 I could not update Etoys 4.x using yum as it was 2mb larger than the yum cache space; example 2, vim and git are usually the first things I add to a fresh XO install, but I yum install them one at a time, and try to use the text console not from inside Terminal, so as to avoid OOM lockups.

Ok, I think I got it.

Pros - It often works well.
    default update method for Fedora.
Cons - Bandwidth
      memory intensive
      memory intensive daemon by default
      ** prone to failure **

Thanks
david