December 8, 2017

Fedora -- upgrade via DNF

I just used this to take two machines from F24 to 25, to 26, to 27. Not a hitch with either.

This is my first time using this method. I have always upgraded using yum before. What a wonderful change! This could not be nicer.

I start by upgrading a remote machine from F24 to F25. As instructed, I do the following:
su
dnf upgrade --refresh	(yields: nothing to do)
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade	(gives me two packages)
dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=25
dnf system-upgrade reboot
After you have once installed the plugin, there is no need to install it again. It is one of your packages now that DNF keeps up to date.

It wants to install 112 and upgrade 1456 packages. I say yes. This is my work machine, and it is very fast from a local mirror over a fast network. When I issue the command to reboot it does so, then starts installing packages using the old kernel. Then it reboots itself to the new system.

This worked fine remotely (but of course it was all in the dark so to speak), and while my remote system was doing the installs blind, I did the upgrade process for my home system (from 25 to 26) This system is via my DSL link and is slower, but not bad. The download takes about 20 minutes, and installs a bit longer. By the time it was all done I could log in to my remote system.

So, this is a massive improvement over using yum for upgrades.

All in all, each upgrade takes just under an hour, dominated by the time to install the packages. Downloading them takes about 20 minutes, and installing them takes about twice that long.


Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]