[CALUG] Fedora upgrade .... CALUG Digest, Vol 54, Issue 14

Walt Smith waltechmail at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 19 12:31:07 EDT 2011



I don't recall anyone saying why /boot needs so much
space on an upgrade.

I have 3 kernels on F12. I did rpm -i rather than rpm -U

The biggest files in /boot are:

initfs   11 meg
vmlinuz  3.3 meg
system.map  1.6 megs

So I have 3 of each with a total /boot space of about 50 megs
including misc files such as grub etc, most of which are "small".

I can see some reason where an "upgrade" might require a bit more
space that a single kernel install.  But gee whizz !!!


The numbers bandied about suggest that the /boot wants to occupy
a full cylinder of a disk ( or rather some upgrade script program
wants the space) (true:  ???? , ????).



-------

As an aside,  I fired up a FC6 yesterday.
The terminal fonts are nicer than F12.   The apps start faster.
They run smooth, the mouse is most responsive.

F12 is on a 2.8 gig box with 1 gig ram.
FC6 is on a 667 mhz box with 512 megs ram.

Generally, over the years this has always been the case: older runs faster
on slower hardware ( I'd say a dozen comparisons ).   The older distros
my have a (very) few less features....    but the sound plays and the movies
play.   It's the incompats with all the yearly  "newer" versions of the 

data files and servers that force me to upgrade my desktop OS.
I was also surprised how little difference there was between the apps in FC6 and F12.

Memory ( human) can play tricks.  But I also preferred the look and feel of the
graphical boot window ( progress bar) and the FC6 desktop.


I'd been looking forward ( somewhat)  to upgrading  ( new install on other disk) 

to F15.   But I think I'll wait til the "next" edition (F16).   Guess I should check the 

dev list to see what will be  "new" or greatly improved in F16. (if anyone wants to donate
to ca-list the improvements, please say). 

I know I've mention this subject before.  But it's been awhile and thought with the recent
thread "new vs upgrade install"  might be worth simply repeating at this time.   Heaven knows
how much longer the desktop will exist.  Most likely in 3 years, the tablets ( or smartphones)
will have enough power that desktops go away forever and laptops wilt into server class performance
machines.



Walt............



Message: 3
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 08:02:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bryan J Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org>
Subject: Re: [CALUG] Fedora upgrade unsuccessful
To: Joe <joe_tseng at hotmail.com>, calug at unknownlamer.org
Message-ID: <521249.81174.qm at web110813.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Yep, 200MB isn't going to be enough for /boot.  Recommend 512MiB or 1GiB 
(1024MiB) at least.

As far as requiring a "fresh install," that's not true at all.  Use a Resizing 
Boot CD, run system-config-lvm to shrink the LV-VG-PV and then gparted to 
increase the size of /boot.

 
Celebrating over 13,000 emails in my Yahoo Inbox !


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