[K12OSN] updates

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 10:37, Will Hatch wrote:

>  If someone has the time, what is the bottom line with
>  doing updates for Fedora Core 1/k12ltsp 4.0.1?  Thanks!

Generally the updates are there because someone decided
that the old version had a problem serious enough to be
worth the effort to fix as a backport to the old release
instead of just waiting for the next one so you probably
do want to apply them.  Up2date, yum, or apt-get will
only install the updates for the programs you already
have installed and since the fix may be to a possible
security exploit you should apply them all or wade through
the update notices to decide if any are safe to ignore.

Most updates completely replace your old version but
keep the configuration.  The kernel is a special case
because there is a small chance that a change will
keep some machines from being able to boot, so the
updater does not remove the old one.  Normally you
want to run the latest one, and smp if you have more
than one processor.  Keeping a few old ones that you
can pick from the boot screen doesn't take too much
space but if it bothers you or you are running out of
space in /boot you can use:
 rpm -qa |grep kernel
to see all the installed versions and
 rpm -e kernel-verson_number
to remove old ones you no longer use.

Uname -a will show the running version if you aren't
sure which is the default.  You do have to reboot
after a kernel update to start using it - you don't for
most other updates.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com