linuxgeek: Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Presto and Fedora

Friday, October 30, 2009

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Presto and Fedora

On Fri, 2009-10-30 at 06:08 +0000, Arturo Ovalle wrote:

>
>
> I installed Fedora 11 to my wife's netbook. In Fedora you have to
> configure many things, because there are several packages that distro
> does not include, like audio and video codecs, flash plugins, etc. I
> found a blog where explains step by step how to configure the system.
> In that blog, the author recommends to install presto plugin to make
> downloads faster in about 40%. So I gave it a try. I installed Fedora
> 11, and then the presto plugin to my wife's netbook and I installed
> Fedora 11 in my netbook too, but without presto plugin. It is AMAZING
> how fast it downloads the packages. Updating her system took less that
> 50% of the time it took to update mine (it only works in command
> line). Does any of you know how it works, and why other distributions
> are not using something like that?
>

Hi,
This question is a really good example of why it's suggested that a
google search should be the first port of call with Linux questions. My
google search on "presto plugin" led me to the
Fedora website (top of the list) where I learned:

Presto works with 'delta' repositories. What this means is instead of
downloading an entire update for a package, presto enables the user to
download only the difference between the installed package and the
updated version, known as the delta.

Presto is only available for Fedora 11 as far as I can tell (could
easily be wrong here). At any rate, presto works with RPMs. It may be
able for use by other distros in future that are RPM based, but that is
only my speculation. Distros that work with different package managers
(apt, deb etc) wouldn't be able to use presto. Maybe their developers
are working on a parallel downhload plugin, or it could already be
existent, I don't know.

Clay.

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