I have Linux Mint Petra 16 on two machines. I want to upgrade the to Qiana 17 (or Rebecca 17.1). The update process as I understand is, changing the source repo from Petra to Rebecca, and corresponding Ubuntu sources. Doing this on both machines would require me to download the packages twice. Is there a way to download the packages only once for both machines and have one machine upgrade using other's help? (Tags linux and ubuntu because I'm guessing that if there is a way, it would be similar for ubuntu too)
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1 Answer
I was responsible for three Ubuntu servers and half a dozen Ubuntu clients in my previous job. We used Puppet for managing mass updates and upgrades, among other things. It is a complex piece of software that takes quite a bit of learning -- they even have official courses and certification exams for administrators, so I would not recommend it unless you are an inquisitive type of user.
If you only have a couple of computers, I recommend a much simpler approach: simply perform the upgrade procedure on one computer, then copy all the downloaded packages (*.deb files) in /var/cache/apt/archives from that computer to the second one. Then, repeat the upgrade procedure (including updating the package database) on the second computer. The package manager will not download packages that already exist in that directory. Both computers must be running the same version and architecture variant of Ubuntu/Mint for this to work, i.e. either x86 on both computers or x86-64 on both computers.
To avoid having to manually copy the files in /var/cache/apt/archives, you can share that directory using NFS or Samba on one computer and mount it on the other, but that is beyond the scope of your question.
