Okay, I just finished running "urpmi --auto-select" and it worked flawlessly! Hurray for a Mandrake mirror on Internet2 (I’m on a uni-connection with Internet2)! Now here’s a question...now that I’ve updated all these packages, do I have to reboot or anything?

Not normally. Anything you've updated should take place immediately. Rebooting in general is for hardware changes, or to test your init script for errors during bootup (you can run them without rebooting, however most people prefer to reboot to watch them).

I really don't want you 'not' to try Debian now, it's a great distro and might have more to offer you than Mandrake does/did. At the very least you could slide it along side your distro(s) and check it out.

Cool

Okay, I SSH into my box...so how exactly would it be able to make immediate changes to let's say an SSH package and still be able to keep me connected? That's amazing!

As for Debian, yes, I'm definitely going to check it out. The Mandrake box I have is being used for something else anyway so I just wanted to check out "urpmi" on it

Good deal. As for the ssh thing, well, that might just be pure luck, a second version installed somewhere else, lag, and/or a combo of those I don't really have a good answer on that...

I hope you find Debian as good as everyone who uses thinks it is. The installer isn't the best in the world, but you only use that once right? Give it a whirl, I think you'll like it.

Cool

I see you have: "Distribution: Red Hat 7.3" as your distro.
I have never had any problems with up2date on RH7.3.

up2date -uv

Probably because the old version was running in memory and the new version won't take affect until you reload it. Like I can run mozilla, and update it in the background and the old version keeps running. When I close it and open it again is the new version... although I'm sure this could cause a problem hehe

So in the case of the SSH server, how would I restart it without getting disconnected? I guess it's not the end of the world if I get disconnected as long as it restarts successfully .

Here's another question for you about Debian. One of the frustrations I had for RedHat is that new RPMs that were not mission critical seemed to take forever to be released. For example, when the new version of KDE was released, it wasn't until RedHat 7.3 came out that you could get it for RedHat (at least officially from RedHat). RedHat's up2date did not list the new version. I understand that they do this because they want to ensure that it's stable, etc. But for the unstable/testing level of Debian, would brand new packages such as a brand new release of KDE be included to automatically install?

Not exactly.

http://www.debian.org/devel/testing

and the "unstable" is not 'automatically' available...a package actually has to qualify to be a debian package (ie. unstable). So "not everything goes".

one good example, is that I believe Debian requires a package to be built on all supported architectures...something that may not be done on just-released programs (if ever).

Okay, so this is separate from my web server box obviously but what would be a good distro where I could run bleeding edge stuff and update it automatically (with fairly rapid releases)?

you may have to try some of the less known distros - do a google search.

this may be contradicting...often bleeding edge implies having to do a lot more work (dependencies, etc.) - which goes against automatic. Also, if you really want bleeding edge, maybe you can setup a minimal base (slack or debian) and then you'll have to work out of cvs for most other packages - you can play around with scripting, but there will still be manual labor.

I'd say Gentoo comes the closest to having bleeding edge programs and automatic updateing, but I've had a problem with an update breaking everything (last time I used it emerge no longer worked which made it kinda hard to do things ), but its still a young distro and I would imagine the problems will start to work themselves out as it matures.