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

[Jeremiah Foster]

On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 09:12 -0700, David Armour wrote:

> 1. from the More Information, Please Dept... "software updates correct 
> errors, eliminate security vulnerabilities and provide new features" 
> sounds benign. 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?

> 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?

The update-manager on Ubuntu uses a tool called Synaptic. Synaptic is a
graphical front-end to the venerable debian tool apt-get.

When the update-manager says there are updates, what it means is that
there are new versions of a particular software package or packages
available for the particular version of software you are using. This
means that if you are using Dapper, and update-manager says there are
updates, then you have new Dapper packages available that you can
download to your system. These updates usually are new features if you
are running Dapper, but if you are running the Breezy version of Ubuntu,
these updates are generally bug fixes. This is because Dapper is a more
recent version of Ubuntu and therefor still under a more active
development phase. This is a generalization, but largely true. This
allows you to have a cutting edge computer with the latest features
(Dapper) or a more stable machine with lots of software that has already
been tested (Breezy).

When the update-manager tells you that you have lots of new packages to
install (the 48.2 Mb download size message) what it is telling you is
that in the Dapper repository, on the Ubuntu servers, there is 48.3 megs
of updated packages that the update-manager will now install. This is
not one giant package, rather a selection of the packages that exist on
your machine and are updated. For example, if you have installed
firefox, which I believe is done by default, and if there is an update
to firefox, then the update-manager gets the new firefox package on the
remote Ubuntu servers and downloads it to your machine. If you were to
remove firefox from the package management system, say through Synaptic
for example, then the update-manager will ignore any new firefox
packages on the remote servers and not download it, reducing your
download size. 

This is a modular system. You can chose to remove any package you want,
you can change your Ubuntu version, you can even change where the update
manager looks for updates and what type of packages it updates, i.e.
free software or software with a non-free license. 

This is just a cursor overview of the update-management system. The
underlying tool is called dpkg and is quite sophisticated. It sets
debian-based linux distributions apart from their rpm-based brethren and
is one of the reasons that debian (and of course Ubuntu) is so popular.

Regards,

Jeremiah Foster