Installing Red Hat Upgrades.

This information is entirely specific to the upgrades (Red Hat often calls them "errata") distributed in rpm form for Red Hat Linux. Sad to say, they don't give much detail about how to apply the updates.

In an ideal world, all you would do would be:

Unfortunately there are numerous cases where this won't quite do.

The first case is when a new version of rpm is part of the updates. In this case you need to do this first:

The next case is when you get reams of complaints about conflicts, What I do then is to try:

I find that making two passes can be a great help when there is some order dependency that you don't want to take the time to unravel. In any case, it doesn't seem to hurt.

Next thing to beware of is that there may be two versions of an update for some package that conflict with each other. For example in the 6.2 updates you may find:

The thing to do is to delete the older (lower numbered) version. Why Red Hat doesn't do this is beyond me.

The next thing is kernel updates. You definitely don't want to just rpm -Uvh these into your system. At worse you will find yourself with an unbootable system. Some people just avoid these altogether, but you really need to put them in if they solve a security problem. I have a whole other section on dealing with these.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / ttrebisky@as.arizona.edu