O.K., so over the last few days I've tried out different distributions and I now finally decided on Fedora Core 2 (I love the Nautilus browsing).

I have two very basic questions.

1. When the bootloader starts I can choose between a Fedora Core and a Fedora Core-smp. I have a RH Linux 9 Bible I've searched through for an answer but without luck. What's the difference? What's smp?

2. The up2date tells me I have 277 updates "waiting for me". Can I safely in installe the updates without risking anything or should I choose which ones I want?

that's actually Gnome, which is not specific to Fedora. Fedora just has Gnome as the default desktop environment, while most others have KDE as the default.
smp will boot a kernel for multiprocessor support, if you have more than one cpu.
use the updater at your own risk. i've had problems in the past with it (lost internet connection, kernel update killed my system, etc.). generally it's good, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I hate up2date for fedora it always freezes and doesnt work. Use apt-get and synaptic it is amazing and you can up date everything or just search for some. It also has a recomended upgrades thing that when a new upgrade comes it detects whether u will be using it or not.

Yes, I'm not very impressed with up2date. It freezes constantly. I have to start it like 4 times before it actually works. I will try out apt-get and synaptic.

Thanks for the replies guys.

i've also had serious problems with up2date. that's sort of why i don't use fedora anymore. like Jmcatch742 suggested, look around for another updater. other distributions are known for their really good updating utilities. it's a good idea to check some of them out when you get a chance.

Yes, true.

I have just triet out apt-get (both with and without synaptic) and it is just plain great. up2date seems primitive in comparison.