> On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 02:58:47PM -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > > > I'm scared of turning over too much of the system maintenance to > > outside programs; I'm always left cleaning up the mess they make, and > > I don't even know what they did. I've vaguely heard of up2date, but I > > thought it was part of the commercial services? > > You're allowed to setup a free account and use it to update your system, > 'priority' access to redhat's server costs $. You might be interested in > using apt, an excellent program finally freed from the world of debian > (joking), upgrading and installing packages is as simple as: > apt-get install <program> > or > apt-get upgrade > > You can also easily upgrade that 7.2 box to 7.3 by using: > > apt-get dist-upgrade there's also a tool called 'grab' (www.runlevelzero.net/grab) which works really well. it's basically a large perl script; and unlike apt4rpm, it generates the dependency/provision databases itself. so you can use it against arbitrary file repositories; and not just apt-ified ones. I've just used it to upgrade a RH 7.2 box to a 7.3 box; and while it wasn't painless (Redhat decided to make some changes like moving files between packages, and changing the version number of one package from 2.2.2 to 1.0.0; which broke things); it does work. it's a convenient for installing packages; and keeping your system up to date. apt4rpm *may* work better for large upgrades; but I've seen apt4rpm broken more often than not... grab at least is a lot easier to beat into submission. :) Carl Soderstrom. -- Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com