Keeping System Updated
From Grokdoc
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RedHat, SuSE
Red-Carpet, it's an easy to use gnome based installer [rpm]. It's easy to use and gives the user a friendly experiance when it comes to dependences. Red-Carpet supports RedHat, Suse, and a few other distrubutions. Easy replacement for a windows users who uses "windows update"
[--Explain how one uses an "rpm." Is it a file extension like .exe? Can we just double click and it will take care of the rest? --]
Ximian --Nrm101 21:34, 14 Jun 2004 (EDT)
Fedora
Updating Fedora is a breeze. Open a terminal and type :
yum update
It will check what packages are new since the last time you ran yum (if it is the first time, it may take a while), show you what will be updated and ask you if you want it do download and install that for you. Type Y and press enter.
That's all :)
Slackware
You can update Slackware manually by monitoring the Slackware changelogs and downloading and updating packages using the built-in 'pkg' tools.
However, a third party application, swaret, is a handy tool for performing automated updates.
Debian stable versus Debian non-stable
Debian stable gave me no problems of updating. A complete newby would not get into the shell, but a button-shell script (with the help of sudo) could be set up to do apt-get update&&apt-get upgrade.
Both debian stable+backports and debian testing, however, will eventually give problems to newbies. Sometimes things break, and I have to resort to dpkg and/or manually delete /var/cache/apt/archives/offending-package.deb
It would be nice to have a way to use either backports or testing without those problems. Maybe a unique backports repository is the way, even if one loses flexibility. If the setup only relies on a unique backports repository (which works well and is properly tested), one can apt-get update&&apt-get dist-upgrade without problems. A botton with a script would be a great help for newbies.
Not wanting to learn new things
Or "if ain't broken, don't fix it". A lot of users which don't like to use the computer, don't like to learn new things, either. If they invest time learning a way to do something, they would like to use this knowledge for as long as possible. There are problems involved when updates imply perceivable changes in the GUI. It would be nice if there is always an option to only update security-related issues, while mantaining the user interaction intact (yes, some bugs included, as they already know how to cope with them, while learning a new way of doing the same task is time-consuming).
