At Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:19:25 -0500 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 02:14:02PM +0200, Aleksandar Stoisavljevic wrote:
This is ok when I have good internet speed (@work) but when I am home, this update takes a lot of time.
Welcome to life on the internet.
I guess I can skip updates but I wasn't experiencing such annoyance with CentOS 5.4. My gues is that when CentOS 5.4 was finalized there is no updates to that DVD.
Why in the world would you opt to skip updates? How is updating your system an annoyance?
5.X are just point-in-time snapshots of CentOS 5 and all patches leading up to the time that 5.X was released. Updates are a continuing process that will occur for the lifetime of the release.
Is there any suggestions ?
Yes, bite the bullet and update.
The main problem is that yum is NOT well written to deal with a slow and *unreliable* dial-up interface -- it in fact behaves extremly poorly when used with dial-up (and no, it is just not possible for me to get a better internet connection at home -- dialup is *all* that is available where I live). It assumes that ANY network problems are due to a busy server and it switches to another server (and in the case of metadata, starts the download from the beginning!). *I* often find it better to use wget to snarf the repo metadata. I *also* use my laptop to *manually* download (using wget) the packages for my desktop machine (the two machines are different archs: the desktop is x86_64 and the laptop is a i686).
Oh, and I remove up-to-date and yum's update deamon. Both are a waste of time. (I also removed Open Office, since it is too big to maintain on a dial-up system, esp. since *I* don't ever do 'word processing'.) I manually run 'yum check-update' from time to time (when is the centos updates digest going to resume on this list?).
John