Newbie questions about updates

[Mario Vukelic]

On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 22:22 -0400, Simon Bassett wrote:
> This is done for stability. However, once you get brave, you can enable
> the backports repos and get the packages that are backported. 

And I'd like to add for the benefit of the OP that of course he can
update to new stable versions every 6 months.

> Speaking from experience, it is as easy as changing your sources list
> and doing an sudo apt-get dist upgrade. Welcome aboard.

Here I must object. It /can/ be as easy but it is not recommended,
especially not for new users. The recommended method is using the
graphical Update Manager in menu System > Administration
      * It is much easier than manually editing sources.list, etc.
      * It does things automatically a user might forget (and often
        does, judging from upgrade questions on the list) such as
        disabling third-party repositories or reinstalling
        ubuntu-desktop if it was removed some time earlier
      * The upgrade algorithm is hand-shaped to find the best upgrade
        path  between these particular older and the newer distros, and
        is not a generic conflict resolver as is used when doing
        apt-get* dist-upgrade
See this posting by Matt Zimmerman (Ubuntu CTO):
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-July/019461.html
(and, if interested, the preceding thread) 

In any case one should read the Upgrade Notes which will be available
at a site like this; replace "Dapper" with the code name of the distro
to upgrade to: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperUpgrades


Kind regards,
M

* If doing a manual dist-upgrade, in general aptitude is recommended
over apt-get as it is much better at resolving dependencies. Debian
recommended it for the dist-upgrade to sarge