Problems with Updates

[Mario Vukelic]

On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 03:04 +0000, Kennneth P. Turvey wrote:
> In the last couple of months, automatic updates from Ubuntu have broken 
> sound and XV extensions for X11 on my system. 

Which Ubuntu version, which updates exactly?

>  I think that in the future 
> once I have my system working correctly, I'm just going to neglect the 
> updates, all of them, including security updates.  

This is a supremely bad idea.

> What is the biggest risk associated with this on a laptop computer?  I 
> just don't think security updates are going to be that big a problem for 
> me.  

The biggest risk is that your computer is taken over and made part of a
bot net that is used to attack the Pentagon, and that all your personal
data is stolen and sold.

Well, you asked for the BIGGEST risk :)

> Is there a way to mitigate this problem without my system breaking on a 
> regular basis? 
> 
> Why aren't these updates more solid than this?  There is no reason that 
> whole subsystems should be trashed by an automatic update.  Wait until 
> they are stable!

Hard to say, never happened to me in many years of Ubuntu usage. It
would help if you could point at the updates that broken things.