[nzlug] Ubuntu Update Rate / Size etc (veers slightly OT)

[Mathew Carley]

> Many ISPs in Australia offer an unmetered mirror service, which often
> includes the various major Linux distributions.  I get my Ubuntu updates
> free; perhaps you can find a similar service in NZ?
>
> Regards,
>         Daniel
>
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  This gets new versions of software, or more significant updates,
>      rather than just security patches.  Nice for a desktop, but more
>      updates and move volume -- since it tends to be big, visible
>      packages that update there.
>
>   
I guess I'm fortunate to not have to worry about bandwidth, but being 
frustrated that almost every day I come home to find Hardy prompting me 
to "click here to install updates", I decided to blitz it and give 
Fedora 9 a go, so I downloaded the Net Install CD and ran that, did some 
washing, went to the supermarket and came home to find Fedora waiting 
for me to hit reboot.

After a couple of muckups with Gnome not having permissions to anything, 
(such as .ICEauthority, as I didn't blitz my home partition), I logged 
in as root, ran "chown -R myusername:myusername *" and logged back in as 
the normal user and it pretty much just worked (though Fedoras software 
repo's don't seem to have as much stuff in there by default, but I also 
haven't enabled the Fedora-equivalent of Multiverse either). Guess I 
should run a couple of tests (for example, multimedia and file sharing) 
and see how it goes.

It wasn't until after I'd done this that the thought occurred to me: 
infrequent updates = bad; frequent updates = good, as it shows that 
everything is being actively maintained and fixed. B'oh. Guess I shall 
run it for a couple of days and if it bothers me, I'll try OpenSuSE 11, 
and if *that* still bothers me, I guess I'll fall back to Ubuntu (7.10 
or 8.04 - haven't decided - the machine is a slightly older HP nx9005), 
since most things tend to "just work" (even the ATi integrated graphics 
and the US Robotics PCMCIA Wireless card require very little messing 
around).