Upgrade to FC6 takes very, very long time

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Sun Nov 26 02:02:10 UTC 2006


On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 20:41 -0500, Wade Hampton wrote:
> How about loading Xenix on a Tandy 6000 using a 8" floppy or loading
> Xenix on a 386 using a few 5.25" disks.... I deployed Xenix systems
> over 20 years ago that used a full 32-bit Microsoft compiler and had
> uptimes measured in months while my friends were doing 8 and 16-bit
> stuff on DOS.....  SCO Xenix rocked (that was the OLD SCO).  I could
> load the system and application in 30 minutes or less from 3-4 disks.
> Slackware  also loaded quite well from floppy with a 0.99 kernel....
> 
> I have NEVER had a Xenix/Unix/Linux install or upgrade that took over
> a few hours, much less well over 12 hours, until I upgraded my laptop
> last night.  Me thinks something be broke.
----
the fact is that FC-6 will accomplish a new install in approx 15-20
minutes including formatting. I would surmise that a typical install
would have between 2 and 7 gigabytes of files installed.

By comparison, an old Xenix, CP/M or whatever from floppy disks might
not have installed more than a megabyte of files.

Upgrading 600 to 800 packages while checking each dependency, including
checking the dependencies of the packages installed to satisfy other
dependencies takes a long time, and this is undoubtedly exacerbated by
the fact that when you boot from a CD and doing an upgrade, you are
dealing with a limited amount of available memory. Perhaps something is
broke but more likely, you are failing to anticipate the actual scope of
what needs to be done in order for the system to accomplish an upgrade.

Craig




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