Hi,

> I am wondering what the best way is to go about staying up to 
> date. If I run 
> apt-get -s upgrade I'm told that apt wants to upgrade about 
> 15 packages, most 
> of which seem to be related to X (we won't ever be using X on 
> this server. it 
> wasn't originally installed and I"d like to get rid of it but 
> some other 
> package I installed had a dependancy on some gtk thing that 
> had one on X. Oh 
> well).

You should just uninstall all the packages related to X, then ;)

> 
> Could anyone confirm that "upgrade" is the right way to stay 
> up to date. I'm 
> not going to run it automatically, and I'll always do a test 
> run first to 
> make sure nothing disastrous is going to happen. 
> 
> Is running upgrade on a regular basis a bad idea for any reason?

On the contrary: I think running upgrade on a regular basis is a very good
idea. I've been running debian testing for a few weeks now, and I 'have' to
do updates once about every two days. Never had any problems - you just run
'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade' and get a cup of coffee, and everything
just keeps working perfectly. Certainly if you're going to check which
updates are being done, I don't see what could go wrong. 

By the way - my stable system needs updates once about every two weeks, just
so you know. Because I got tired of checking if updates were needed by hand
(not something you're willing to do if updates are , I wrote a small cronjob
that runs 'apt-get update; apt-get -s upgrade' and checks if the output
contains "0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove". If it
doesn't, it sends me an e-mail :)

> 
> It just seems like I'll need to be as up to date as possible 
> when Sarge is 
> declared stable in order to make a smooth transition to 
> Sarge/Stable. Correct 
> me if I'm wrong. I've always found it better to update 
> packages a little at a 
> time rather than wait till there's dozens of updates to install. 

I think this is the way to go, though I'm not exactly sure about the entire
debian testing/sarge/woody/etc system..... I do agree that it's better to
update packages a little at a time rather than lots and lots and lots of
packages at once.

> 
> If anyone has advise on how to keep a Testing system secure, 
> I'd really like to hear it.

If security is really an issue to you: lots of websites exist on how to make
a linux system secure, involving very strict SSH settings, firewalls, etc. 

For the average user (such as myself) though, I think it should be enough to
update your programs (packages) regularly, in order to not be harmed by
script kiddies exploiting recent security leaks..... 

Good luck,
Dan


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