All this interest in atomic workstation made me dust off my vm.
While upgrading it, I ran into a number of questions that I couldn't find
any answers
for. This might be useful information to put on a new atomic workstation
website.
Yep. Upgrading from a previous existing install of workstation might be problematic
some of the baked in config may have been off. Hopefully people starting from the
Fedora 27 ISO will have a smoother experience.
1) How do I find out what I'm running ?
I guess the answer to this is rpm-ostree status,
Yep!
but what does it actually tell me ?
● atomicws:atomicws/fedora/x86_64/continuous
Version: 26.447 (2018-01-29 04:58:49)
BaseCommit:
ba986d4649f08705185ba1ce7208e72d149b1e35314d112a86348cb1d61f6f52
LayeredPackages: powerline
It would be nice to explain this output a bit - I assume the first
'atomicws' is a repository name, and 'atomicws/fedora/x86_64/continuous'
is
a branch name. Version 26.447 may indicate that I am running some version
of Fedora 26.
Correct. `atomicws` is the name of the ostree remote (like a git remote) and the
ref (branch) you are following in that remote is `atomicws/fedora/x86_64/continuous`.
Unfortunately, I haven't really seen the gnome-software support
in action yet, but I hope it shows this information as well.
probably not yet :(
2) How do I get the latest updates ?
rpm-ostree upgrade is easy enough (once I've found it).
3) How do I upgrade to a newer release ?
We'll publish guides on this for example when F28 Atomic Workstation is
released, but it would be an `rpm-ostree rebase` command to make your
system start following a different ref.
4) How do I find out what branches are available to rebase to ?
ostree refs does work, but mostly as a user we should guide you enough so
you don't have to muck around too much with that.
5) Where is the repo configuration stored ?
/etc/ostree/remotes.d/
This is where I got stuck - I could not find any answers to these.
Very frustrating, a normal user would have given up here.
Yep. A lot of this is related to you being on a pre-27 atomic workstation. And
our docs aren't great
Eventually, Kalev told me to create a file in /etc/ostree/remotes.d/ with
some content, and then I figured out to run
ostree remote refs fedora
to see the branches in the repo, and
rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/27/x86_64/workstation
to upgrade to one of them. I blindly picked this branch, since
I have no idea what the difference between
you chose the right one :)
fedora/27/x86_64/testing/workstation
fedora/27/x86_64/updates/workstation
fedora/27/x86_64/workstation
so the testing branch has content that includes rpms that are in the updates-testing
fedora yum repository. The updates branch has content that includes the updates repo.
The other branch right now just points to the updates branch. In Fedora Atomic Host
we only release every 2 weeks, if we did the same thing for workstation then the
`fedora/27/x86_64/workstation` branch would only get updated when we did the release
(so not every day).
might be...
Also, I had to disable gpg verification, since I didn't know where
to find the key for that repo.
This should help you: here is the ostree remote config if you installed from the ISO:
```
[dustymabe@localhost ~]$ cat /etc/ostree/remotes.d/fedora-workstation.conf
[remote "fedora-workstation"]
url=https://dl.fedoraproject.org/ostree/27/
gpg-verify=true
gpgkeypath=/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-27-primary
```
We need to make the rpm-ostree plugin support distro-upgrades
inside gnome-software. And also make this information available
in some obvious place.
That would be great!