[Newbie] ubuntu's update-manager???

[Mario Vukelic]

On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 09:12 -0700, David Armour wrote:
> ubuntu's update-manager, a feature that locates it midway between XP and 
> BSD/other linux OSs in terms of user-friendly convenience

I have to disagree here. Windows XP is still stuck in the dark ages in
this regard and only updates Windows itself. All other applications
implement their own (often weird) ways and have to be updated
individually. In Ubuntu, the update manager updates everything, which
IMHO is a big advantage. 

> i'm using dapper beta flight 
> 
> the boilerplate text under "you can install X updates," 
> however, leaves unanswered: what's recommended? all of them? if not, 
> which ones can i safely / optimally ignore / apply? What contributes to 
> the # of updates? Can I do anything to reduce the number?

Have you tried to read the help available from the bottom-left button?
It explains the process quite clearly I think. Of course, specific
improvements are always welcome, e.g. encouraging the user to install
everything that is suggested by update-manager (which is mentioned in
help, but possibly could use more emphasis). 

If you have good ideas, you might want to try and get your feet wet by
writing a bug report here https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/+package or
talk to the documentation teams
https://launchpad.net/people/?name=doc&searchfor=teamsonly


> 2. when update manager says it's  ...downloading 43 of 81files? (...  26 
> m17s remaining) ??? ...with a 53.1Mb download size.... and it does stuff 
> greater or lesser than this EVERY day, what's up with that?

It seems to me that your questions mostly stem from the fact that you
installed the BETA of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). 6.06 is still in
development, and will be release in June. Because development is
ongoing, the developers change packages all the time, which subsequently
get pushed to users.

Once released, only security fixes and grave software errors will be
corrected*, and then the update frequency will drop greatly to maybe a
few packages once in a while. 

This will also make the information given by update-manager much easier
to understand. Currently the changelogs mostly refer to bugs that have
been filed and other problems. After release, they will mostly say,
"this fixes such and such security issue", which will make you want to
install it ;)

* Unless you have enabled the dapper-updates repository, which will
sometimes contain updates that not fall in these categories. It is
recommended (possibly even enabled by default) because it allows Ubuntu
to make important updates - e.g., breezy-updates was used to give users
a better update-manager to users of Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger), to make
upgrading to Dapper easier