Automatically updating RPM installed on the Atari SpareMint

From time to time, there are updates to RPM on the Atari SpareMint respository on GitHub. One can check which RPM are updated by comparing against those installed on your Atari system. Following would be the typical steps to take:

• • Get a list of installed RPM using the "rpm -qa" command

  • Go online and compare each application versions

  • Identify and download those with newer RPM version

  • Update the installation for each of those downloaded RPM packages

Doable.. but may take some time and effort. This guide here provides an automated way of doing all the above steps in a script.

Installing an auto RPM updater

• 1. Make sure your network is up and running on your Atari Mint system.

  2. Install awk. If you followed the RPM List guide, you would have gawk installed, otherwise download the gawk RPM and install it. To install gawk, open a shell and type the following command to install it

rpm -i gawk-3.0.6-1.m68kmint.rpm

• 3. Install CURL. Download the CURL tar from Thorsten Otto website and install it. To install CURL, on the shell type the following command to install it. Make sure you are at root as it installs into usr folder.

cd / ; tar -xvpf curl-7.56.0-mint-020.tar

• 4. Create a folder inside your home folder called "autoupdate". This should be at your ext2 file system drive /d. Change your working directory to it. To create a folder, on the shell type the following command to create it & change working directory

mkdir /d/root/autoupdate

cd /d/root/autoupdate

• 5. Download the auto update scripts from here into the folder /d/root/autoupdate. The file is in TAR format. You will need tar to unarchive it.

  6. Expand the autoupdate.tar file into the current directory (which should be at /d/root/autoupdate). To expand the tar file, on the shell type the following command

tar -xf autoupdate.tar

• 7. Make sure all files have the correct permissions - all file must be readable and the file update must be executable. On a shell type the following command to change the files to the correct permissions

chmod a+r *

chmod a+x update

That's it, you have installed the auto update scripts.

Notes:

• 1. Downloading the RPM packages may be slow, so do not put this script in your startup.

  2. The RPM command itself can download a package, but I found it unstable so I use wget to pull down the package.

  3. The RPM dependencies are not checked in any way by these scripts.

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