On Sun, 2005-08-07 at 15:45 +0300, Ioannis Vranos wrote:
> Ioannis Vranos wrote:
> > I tried to follow the directions of the 
> > https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/howto/upgrade for 
> > upgrading to SL 4.1 from 4, however rpm fails for both statements (4.x 
> > and 41):


The ftp URLs you are using are to broken links.  

What you want is
rpm -Uvh ftp.scientificlinux.org:/linux/scientific/41/i386/SL/RPMS/yum-
conf-41-4.SL.noarch.rpm


Here is the general principle of the 3-step "upgrade for the impatient"

1.  Get and install the version of yum-conf for the distribution you
want to upgrade to.  In this case 41.  How do you know what it is if the
web page is out of date or links have not been updated?  Well it is at
an ftp site and you can go look.  In general i386 rpms for distribution
XX are in ftp.scientificlinux.org:/linux/scientific/XX/i386/SL/RPMS/
It is a good idea to use your web browser to, well browse.  Then
download the rpm and install with rpm -Uvh.  I.e.  it is perfectly fine
to download xxx.rpm and then "rpm -Uvh xxx.rpm" or do 
"rpm -Uvh ftp://whereever/xxx.rpm".  If something is failing try the two
step way to have a better idea of where the problem is.

2. Having installed the correct yum-conf your yum configuration now
points to the files of the correct distribution, so you can do 
"yum update yum".  This is just in case yum has changed -- you want to
be using the one for your distribution.

3. Now you are ready to do the work.  "yum upgrade"
Use upgrade not update to remove obsolete packages.

As a general principle (for which there are exceptions) it seems that
the people who answer questions most on this list use yum not apt.
Therefore you are likely to get better answers to questions about yum.