Ok folks! As up to today each day someone asks about problems he faces running an update on Fedora Core 1, using up2date or yum, I decided to write down in short a FAQ article to this issue. Fedora Core 1 comes with up2date and yum to let people easily install new packages, packages out of the core as well as from third party sources. Both tools are configured by default this way that they connect to the redhat.com server. Due to the high volume it meanwhile has to deal with there is a problem. Users are facing error messages running the update tools, complaints about corrupted GPG keys, wrong file sizes, cryptic python messages, and so on. At least the download is very, very slow. In order to better the situation at all - as now even some of the mirror servers have problems to get in sync with the Fedora repositories on the Redhat server - please change the default configuration files and choose a mirror server for getting packages online. Until there is an easy to use setup tool - either command line based or GUI - we have to do it manually. Follow me ... 1) the up2date way The tool up2date get it's configuration by /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources. It is a plain text file and to be edited with the editor by choice (vim, emacs, nano, joe, ...) Already there are the lines: yum fedora-core-1 \ http://fedora.redhat.com/releases/fedora-core-1 yum updates-released \ http://fedora.redhat.com/updates/released/fedora-core-1 #yum updates-testing \ http://fedora.redhat.com/updates/testing/fedora-core-1 ! I did a "\" in there to be sure the lines are not broken in your window. They are _one_ line, no linebreak, no "\" in it. In the following I will use more "\" to signalize "I wrapped the line but you have not to do so". Put a # in front of each line. This marks them as comments. Now visit http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html and look there for a convenient server. A good advice is to select your country (in USA your coast) and then take one server address Normally, when joining that server address for the Fedora files you will come to a directory where there are 4 directories in: 1, development, test, updates Let us for this example configuration take USA east coast server http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/. We take this URL and set up our first sources entry, the one for the Fedora core files. Enter this to /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources: ## Mirror USA east coast distro.ibiblio.org yum ibiblio-fedora-core-1 \ http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/ Be aware! We are not ready with that last line. It misses the import directory to the core files, which is 1/i386/. So the whole line must look like: yum ibiblio-fedora-core-1 \ http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/os/ Using this scheme it is easy to add the next two repository entries, the one for the updates and the one for testing packages. We first add the line for updates which are in updates/1/i386/: yum ibiblio-updates-released \ http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/updates/1/i386/ Attention! It is one whole line, no breaks, even you see them now in your mail reader. And finally we add the entry for testing packages, but we comment it, as we do not want it active and not getting packages out of this. # yum ibiblio-updates-testing \ http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/updates/testing/1/i386/ Well, ready so far. Save the edited file and run up2date - either on command line or as GUI. It will now show you fetching the package list from the two active repositories. Done! 2) the yum way yum is configured by /etc/yum.conf which by default also uses the Redhat server as source. So let us first comment the 6 lines in this configuration file, beginning with [base] up to the end. Now we enter the source for the core packages, again using the ibiblio.org server (just as an example, please follow the advice given above). [base] name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base baseurl=http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/\ $releasever/$basearch/os/ (Attention: \ for linebreak just by me for visibility!) If you want a second source just add a second line beginning with "baseurl=" followed by the repositories address. The entry for the Fedora released updates then looks this: [updates-released] name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates baseutrl=http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/updates/\ $releasever/$basearch/ That's all. Save the changes to the file and run yum as before and now see it fetching from the mirror. If you want more sources like by third party, i.e. Fedora Extras, Livna.org or FreshRPMs, there is a huge, ready to use yum.conf available at http://fedora.artoo.net/faq/samples/yum.conf. It is too big to be pasted here in whole. At last one further general annotation. When you see that there are new packages for Fedora out, please be a little patient and do not try to get the updates by running your tool every minute or every hour. Nor change your sources back to the Redhat server. I think the update bottleneck will better when the mirror servers can connect the Redhat server at full speed and redistribute their fetched packages around into the world. HTH Alexander P.S. Annotations and especially corrections are welcome. -- Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany PGP key valid: made 13.07.1999 PGP fingerprint: 2307 88FD 2D41 038E 7416 14CD E197 6E88 ED69 5653
