Is it possible to do manually RPM updates? I am not connected to the RHN (Red Hat Network).

Yes, download the rpms you want, check them with "rpm --checksig *.rpm" and upgrade with "rpm -Uvh *.rpm".

Lots (and lots) more information under "man rpm"

John

there are a lot of packages!

is there a way to automate this process? perhaps with a crontab script?

That's what up2date does. I suppose it's not 100% automatic, but if you subscribe to RHN (you'll have to pay for that now, I guess), you will get e-mail notifications about new packages and then you just have to run "up2date -u".

You could create a weekly or monthly crontab for this, but it's the sort of job you're better off watching and doing interactively.

John

Try this site for amore info.


http://www.rt.com/man/rpm.8.html

I opt not to pay for the RHN, I rather save some money and do my updates manually.

that only gives the man pages.. nothing on getting & updating the packages.

I don't mean to sound crabby, but I'm not sure what you're asking at this stage? You started out asking about manual updates and then about automating that process, now you're back to manual...

You can get all the packages by ftp (I like the gftp utility). That's not a lot of work. Are you asking how to do that? Have a look at "man ftp" and post again if you are.

Or is time the issue? If you're connected with a 56k modem, I can imagine that it would be, but you should be able to find a computer with a faster connection and a cd-burner somewhere.

John

Sorry for that, I did have the time to read the whole page, just in the middle of an assignment, thought it could be of some help

Without RHN, you need not apply updates manually. You can look into using update tools like Yum or apt-rpm: http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraHOWTO