Linux 101: Updating Your System

"There is one thing to understand about updating Linux: Not every distribution handles this process in the same fashion. In fact, some distributions are distinctly different down to the type of file types they use for package management.

" * Ubuntu and Debian use .deb
* Fedora, SuSE, and Mandriva use .rpm
* Slackware uses .tgz archives which contain pre-built binaries
* And of course there is also installing from source or pre-compiled .bin or .package files.

"As you can see there are number of possible systems (and the above list is not even close to being all-inclusive). So to make the task of covering this topic less epic, I will cover the Ubuntu and Fedora systems. I will touch on both the GUI as well as the command line tools for handling system updates."

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