Red Hat FedoraCore4 Up2date Guide

With almost a month since the release of FedoraCore4 (Stentz) there have been quite a few official updates from Red Hat to upgrade such packages as Open Office, Xorg, and the Linux 2.6.12 kernel. When FedoraCore3 came about, we presented a how-to article for creating your own Red Hat Up2date LAN repository. This repository allowed locally connected computers to retrieve updates significantly faster while offering greater package management. With FedoraCore4, however, came a revised version of Up2date. Although this updated copy is substantially improved upon previous versions, it still has its share of bugs. In this article, we’re sharing the revised steps for creating new update channels along with other basic configuration tips.

After doing a fresh install of FedoraCore4, the Up2date GNOME applet was already blinking bright with available updates. However, when clicking this it no longer just brings up the Red Hat Network Alert Notification Tool but also a subscription alert box. This new box simply lets the user know the subscription has yet to be activated. The options are presented to activate the subscription, activate it later, or to simply not activate it at all. This feature is for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and we had no troubles simply closing the window and then continuing our Up2date adventure. However, it then appeared that there’s a small bug preventing the number of updates from being properly reported in the GNOME Up2date applet.

Also presented when you run Up2date for the first time is the Red Hat Network Configuration. Alternatively, you can access this configuration panel at a later time by Desktop > System Settings > Red Hat Network Configuration or simply entering up2date-config into the Terminal. From this Up2date configuration panel, in the Retrieval / Installation tab we simply checked the box for "After installation, keep binary packages on disk". If the default package storage directory of /var/spool /up2date isn’t your preferred storage location, you can also change that at this time. Keeping the binary RPM packages on the disk after downloading them will allow you to easily distribute the RPMs over a LAN connection with other computers on the network, rather than having to download these packages individually every time from an Internet RPM repository. Alternatively, you can simply backup these packages to an external storage medium when reformatting your computer so you can quickly and easily update the machine.

The version of Up2date we’re using at the time of writing this article is 4.4.23-4 where as the version that shipped with FedoraCore3 was 4.3.47-5. The version can be attained by entering up2date --version into your Terminal.