Update to Upgrade 2.0

Thanks to Jan Andrejkovic for pointing out a tool I missed in my column "Upgrade 2.0" [5]. Fedora ships with a program called Presto [6] that uses DeltaRPMs to provide smaller updates. In my first test, a normal update would have required 972MB of downloads, but with Presto, it was a mere 224MB (pretty impressive savings). Fedora 11 now includes a yum-presto package (not to be confused with the presto package that is a graphics-related engine) that is a plugin for the yum program. Installation is simple:

yum install yum-presto

First, manually update your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo to include either a baseurl or mirrorurl pointing to a site that carries the presto RPMs (they are signed with the GnuPG key of Jonathan Dieter, so you need to trust him). Alternatively, you can run your own repository and create RPMs with the presto-utils. If you have more than one system, this might be your best bet.

The Author

Kurt Seifried is an Information Security Consultant specializing in Linux and networks since 1996. He often wonders how it is that technology works on a large scale but often fails on a small scale.