HiYa --- I just got Debian Woody instally (very basically) on my desktop.

Can anyone make any recomendations about a good practice to follow for keeping things up to date --- i.e. the kernel, packages etc.

I know that apt, deselct etc. can mage things for me but how often should you be trying to do this etc. or if there is a good sensible strategy. I am not cutting edge or doing any development but do like to know that thngs are reasonably up to date with new releases --- especially if it prevents software dependencies later on.....

Cjiz

If you run a stable Debian release such as Woody you only need to run apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade every once in a while. In the stable release there are no new packages introduced, but they can be updated because of security problems or other issues. You should do this once a week or so. Make sure you have the security updates from security.debian.org in your /etc/apt/sources.list configuration file to get the stuff you need.

If you run testing (the current testing distribution is called Sarge - which will become the new stable release some time in the future) you will probably need to use apt-get dist-upgrade instead of the regular apt-get upgrade to make sure dependancies are satisfied.

Håkan

I would highly recommend using aptitude when doing this. It makes it easier choosing which files you want to upgrade as opposed to all. It also makes it easier to hold packages you don't want changed for whatever reason. Like mine. I installed KDE 3.1.4 and when some packages get installed they conflict with the 3.1 and want 2.2 instead. So I want my new kde packages to be held. Also, if you want to do it a step at a time (I only have a 56K dial up so downloading 7hours worth of upgrades was a bit) you can set it to only update a few files at a time. apt-get upgrade will download all upgrades in one shot.