My friend has Fedora 37 workstation but don’t have internet on this machine can it be upgraded offline to 38? He uses mobile hotspot sometimes when needed but don’t have enough data limit to complete upgrade. Or any method to download upgrade packages in batch over few days so it can cover data limit?
It’s difficult unless you clone the Fedora repositories to a portable storage.
Sharing the Internet with USB tethering from a smartphone is likely an easier option.
Okay.
Do you have sufficient internet access? If yes, you could download the repos for your friend on to a pendrive/hard disk and they could use it as an “offline repository”. Info on doing this here:
Okay i will try that
I was in this situation for many years, desktop without any internet connection.
Still was able to use Fedora by downloading a lab version of the Workstation that has the best options of packages for my personal use, in my situation that was “The Design Suite”. You may not have access to any repositories yet at least essential programs you might need. The way I went about getting the latest versions of Fedora Design Suite was through a local library where I was able to access the internet and download the .iso onto a thumb drive. Then I would take the thumb drive to my home computer and use Fedora Media Writer or other program to create a live thumb drive version used for installation of the latest version.
For some time there was this on-line web site called OSDiscs that sold and shipped a complete repository set of double layered DVD discs plus choice of desktop preference for under $40. Installing those DVD repositories did consume a considerable amount of memory, over 80GBs. You might need to consider that necessary amount of free memory for installation of entire dnf repositories on a desktop. If you have limited memory space then the alternative mentioned in the previous paragraph might be a work around for at least some essential programs and upgrade to latest version of Fedora. After such you may still need security fixes and updates, yet a work around here would be to use a stand alone version of Firefox that will allow you to manually update through the browser help menu on a regular basis. I have used these standalone versions of Firefox and they seem to work as an alternative to the pre-installed version that comes with the operating system. I am not an IT specialists and there may be some security issues with using these stand alone versions of a browser yet before Linux had on-line repositories available that was probably the only way to gain access.
Would it be possible to take the machine to a location where he could have internet sufficient to perform the upgrade, then the normal updates would not need as much data transfer. This might be done as a one-time thing for upgrade purposes only and if the machine has no problems should take no more than a couple hours total.
Using the dnf system-upgrade procedure seems fastest and most reliable to me.
Soooo, this is hacky, but you can basically just do this with the regular dnf upgrade process.
First, make sure that Software isn’t pulling down updates by itself in the background. In the Network Settings, you should be able to mark the connection as “metered”, and that should stop that kind of thing. (But I’d turn off Automatic Updates in GNOME Software just to be sure.)
Then, you can use DNF from the command line, and do dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=38
as normal — but stop it with ctrl-c after you’ve downloaded enough for the day. The packages that you’ve downloaded so far will be cached. Run the same command again the next day, and again stop it if it hits the limit. Repeat until it’s got everything.
At that point, run dnf system-upgrade reboot
and… there you go!
If you are going down that route, you can set bandwidth and/or thottle in dnf.conf
bandwidth
storage size
Total bandwidth available for downloading. Meaningful when used with the throttle option. Storage size is in bytes by default but can be specified with a unit of storage. Valid units are ‘k’, ‘M’, ‘G’.
Wow this can work hope to see this feature in software center itself one day
Pretty likely you won’t see that from Gnome Developers. Fedora/Gnome is not inclusive when it comes to data usage. It requires huge amount of data downloads for metadata and daily updates, and especially with flatpaks.
However, feel free to request that feature with Gnome devs: Issues · GNOME / Settings · GitLab