On Thu, 6 Nov 2003, Alan Dayley wrote:

> On Thursday 06 November 2003 09:33 pm, Bob Holtzman wrote:
> > On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Alan Dayley wrote:
> > > Goto freshrpms.net and download the RPM enabled apt-get.  Then, you can
> > > run updates based on several RPM repositories.  They seem to keep them
> > > pretty "up2date" and follow the security patches well.  I use it to
> > > maintain my older RH 7.3 boxes.
> >
> > That site doesn't display properly for me.
> 
> What browser are you using?  That surprises me.

Netscape 4.8. I haven't tried with Konqueror yet. I suspect it's because I 
don't have some plug-in or other.

> > Is there a way to automatically tell which patches to install without
> > checking to see exactly what is installed on your box? That feature is one
> > of the things I liked best about Red Hat.
> 
> Once you have apt-get, you can do these two commands:
> 
> apt-get update
> apt-get upgrade
> 
> The second one will list all the packages that it found on your computer for 
> which the package repository has newer versions, ie. a list of the packages 
> it wants to upgrade.  It then asks to proceed.  If you only wanted the list, 
> just say no to the question.  Then, to upgrade selected packages from the 
> list, type them in the command line like this:
> 
> apt-get upgrade package1 package2 package3 [etc.]
> 
> Not to hard.

That sounds like exactly what I'm looking for.

> 
> There is also a GNOME based GUI front end to apt-get called synaptic.  It 
> looks pretty nice but I had some problems with version 0.42 on my Red Hat 
> Linux 9 box that I have not tracked down yet.  There is a newer version out 
> that I have not yet tried that is supposed to directly address the issues I 
> saw when I tried it.  Maybe it will work well for you.

Red Hat's GUI has given me fits ever since I phased out 6.0 and installed 
7.1.

Thanks for the information.

-- 
Bob Holtzman
"It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids 
around with power tools."