recommended tool to auto update rpms?

[Kevin Buettner]

On Nov 2, 12:23pm, Frank Reichenbacher wrote:

> RH 6.2 has the same feature, albeit with a few bugs. I tried to use it to
> upgrade the kernel and after it crunched away determining which updates were
> appropriate for my system, it came back with a message saying it was
> excluding the kernel rpms because I hadn't requested them. There is no way
> to select packages to upgrade in advance, so there is no way to use the
> update feature to upgrade the kernel.

I may be doing my employer a disservice by saying this, but I almost
never use the kernel that comes with the distribution.  I usually
fetch the kernel sources and build it myself once the basic OS install
is done.  (Okay, so I do run the distribution supplied kernel for just
long enough to build a new kernel myself.)

I recently upgraded one of my machines to RH7 and wound up not using
the kernel that shipped with RH7 *at all*.  I had previously built
2.4.0-test9 on my RH6.2 install on the same box and had configured
software RAID for the new disks that I had just bought.  I installed
RH7 on a free partition on one of these new disks, then rebooted into
6.2 and copied over the just completed install to one of the md
(raid-1) partitions.  Once that was done, I updated lilo.conf to boot
RH7 with 2.4.0-test9.  (And so on...)

Anyway...  with regard to the problem that you mentioned, I think
there's a way to specify in advance which areas that you're interested
in.  For some reason (though I don't know what it is), the default
is to exclude the kernel.  Ah... I found it.  The utility is called
up2date-config and there's a tab labeled "Package Exceptions".  In
the box entitled "Package Names to Skip", there's an entry called
"kernel*".  You may wish to remove this entry and try again.

Kevin