Discussion on: Install Fedora 37 or earlier on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

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Replies for: Do you happen to know how can I upgrade the distro to a newer image without losing all info (such as installed packages)?

Are you saying you have Fedora 32 and want to upgrade to Fedora 33? If so, this works for me:

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=33
sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot
sudo dnf system-upgrade upgrade
(Close the terminal and restart; I even restarted wsl, but I am not sure that is necessary.)
sudo rpmdb --rebuilddb
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
sudo dnf system-upgrade clean

What do you think? Does that work? Wouldn't hurt to do a backup first.

Timor Gruber • Oct 9 '20

Not exactly what I meant, though it's nice to know that it actually works!
The scenario I'm asking about is having installed a specific build of Fedora, say the latest 33 available from their servers, how can I "install" a newer build that comes, say, a week after? It would require a new rootfs, which doesn't play well with WSL's capabilities at the moment, i.e. I'd have to install a new, separate distro for it to work

Jonathan Bowman • Oct 9 '20

Now that, friend, is a brilliant question. You don't want to just dnf upgrade? Am I hearing you right?

I honestly don't know a good answer yet. I don't know that wsl can import and merge tarballs. I suppose you could unpack a new tarball at the root of your filesystem, but that would scare me. Other thoughts?

Timor Gruber • Oct 9 '20

Well, maybe I'm not familiar enough with how Fedora builds work - Are you saying that simply executing dnf upgrade will keep me up-to-date with the latest system changes occurring to Fedora?
I mean, I know that dnf manages all of the system's packages, but as I work with a non-stable version of Fedora (33), doesn't it mean that you should update your build once in a while? I'm yet to have experience with Fedora's beta releases :)

Jonathan Bowman • Oct 9 '20 • Edited

Oh, yes. dnf upgrade will serve you well! Further details here, including the instructions:

You shouldn't need to do anything to get the final public release, other than install package updates as they become available. You can use "sudo dnf update" or wait for desktop notification.

Timor Gruber • Oct 11 '20

Awesome!!! Well, that truly makes a custom installed Fedora a great candidate for a productive WSL distro 😎

Thanks for your help!