I’m trying to upgrade to fedora 39 xfce but the download it taking an insane amount of time. I had to stop it yesterday. After 2 hours, it was only at 14%.
I have a good internet connection and I’m using sys-whonix for all updates.
I did the same thing on another machine, worse in every way compared to the one I’m trying to use, and it went fine. Install took a while because that one’s connection isn’t great, but not even close to what I’m seeing right now.
Is there a setting I need to change or something? I’m looking at the download right now and it says 6.17kB/s. My internet is NOT that slow.
recognised this too, but always tried it again to a different time and then it was working much quicker.
Also do all these downloads via sys-whonix.
So, restart your sys-whonix and try it again - maybe not today in the evening, but tonight or tomorrow early in the morning (if you have some free minutes).
I think unman was right. It was super slow, but as TheGardner said, it was variable.
I started over and it was moving at around half a meg for most of the time, then shot up to 1.6mg/s for a while. It’s officially installed and seems to be working now.
Now that’s solved, I still have a question relating to my overall goal to upgrade to fedora 39. Do any of you have any guidance on this question?
Can only tell, what I do:
I always install new versions of ‘my’ templates from scratch. Means I always install the main Fedora/Debian templates of each actual version from the qubes repos and copy then templates for my use, which will change because of installing/uninstalling software there and keep the earlier downloaded templates original.
So whatever I did (i.e. with my Fedora 38 template) I always do ‘again’ with the Fedora 39 template - mostly of the steps I wrote down on a note, so I always can do the steps again by reading the note… This is easy for installing the needed software tools but a pain, if you always have to create special VMs new (pihole, sys-vpn etc.)…
a simple improvement could be to write a shell script in your template that does all the step every time you run it. For a newer version, you would only have to copy this script to the new template.
a better improvement but which requires more work would be to configure it entirely with salt instead of a shell script.
Salt configuration is better and (in many cases) can be clearer and more
flexible than shell script, even in a simple case. For more complex
case, across distros, it is much clearer.
But for your original question:-
I would
Update the base template/standalone
Clone the template/standalone
Change the repo definitions in the clone
upgrade clone in standard method.
Check clone system is working.
This is fully explained in the docs
Steps 1 to 4 can be automated in salt - I can explain if you want to go
that route.
I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.
Being able to do 1 through 4 in salt sounds awesome!
I just spent two days getting everything redone. I’ve successfully upgraded in place both templates and standalones, which was something I’d never done before. Even with that stamp of “Advanced users only,” I managed it without a whole lot of hassle.
Even so, I don’t want to have to do that every-time there’s a new fedora version.
I’ve never gotten into salt automation either. I look forward to taking a look.
Tor being slow and Salt automation are two very separate topics. Anyway, here are some tips:
You can’t make the Tor network faster, but you can opt to download templates and updates over clearnet or a VPN instead, if you’d prefer to trade some security and privacy for some speed.
You can’t make Fedora releases slower (or their support cycle longer), but you can opt to use Debian templates instead. Debian has a much slower release cycle (and longer-supported releases) than Fedora.
sys-whonix icon → sys-whonix → tor control panel → restart tor
in case the template gui or background process hangs, stop tor (instead of restart), kill it’s pids and restart tor afterwards.
sometimes i have to to this 2-3 times to get rid of 20-50kb/s download speeds.
would be nice of the template system recognized a broken connection (stop tor) so you wouldn’t have to kill the pids running in the background manually.