Hello,

I am using Fedora, but have a temperamental internet connection at home. Updating can be difficult because large downloads are slow and tend to reach timeouts most of the time.

Is there a way to have my system download one update from the list at a time instead of multiple?

This might at least help prevent me needing to retry upwards of 4-5 times hoping it all eventually succeeds within the timeout and failure limits it seems to have.

I did check online a bit and the manual for dnf, but web searching seems to bring up “updating a single package” not iterating through the available updates to baby my horrible internet. And the manual didn’t seem to mention anything regarding this.

Hoping there is something.

Thank you very much for any suggestions or guidance.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    71·
    4 days ago

    It doesn’t really make sense to do that. Even if you do resolve dependencies to identify which one needs to come first, you’re still going to need to take manual action to download and install subsequent packages.

    You should probably see if you can increase the timeout and number of retries, or just set it to run with --download-only (or whatever the dnf equivalent is) in a loop until it succeeds. Then you can run the actual install all in one go from the download cache.

    • vimmiewimmie@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      It looks we’ve been able to find the following for the config file for dnf:

      max_parallel_downloads in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf.

      Here’s a post on how to increase it - so do the opposite, and set it to 1.

      Thank you for taking the time to help me out. I appreciate it.

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Let us know if it works. Based on your description of the problem, it sounds like you’ll find it still times out due to a bad connection, except you’ll have gotten fewer downloads done.

        • vimmiewimmie@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          I’ll let you know!

          My signal reliability and bandwidth will stay the same, but, distributing that between 1 download compared to 4-5 might make an improvement on it’s own, allowing the download to more often finish before it times out. But, we’ll see. Gotta get back to my PC.

          If not, maybe the timeout setting in the config file will help a little.

          Will report back!

      • vimmiewimmie@lemm.eeOPEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Hello.

        I just wanted to leave this here, in case you wanted to look into it for something you had.

        It looks we’ve been able to find the following for the config file for dnf:

        max_parallel_downloads in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf.

        Here’s a post on how to increase it - so do the opposite, and set it to 1.

        Thank you for taking the time to help me out. I appreciate it.