Mirror, mirror for my updates

Hamish Taylor
Monday, 16 June 2008 05:48

Opinion and Analysis

In my first article I highlighted a little known feature of Ubuntu Linux: you can tell your computer to force you to take a break. In this article I want to tell you how you can update from your ISPs Linux mirror and how that can save some of your precious monthly downloads.

Updating an operating system is vital. To protect your system, you need to have the latest security updates. And often updates will fix bugs and sometimes give you extra functionality.

Many people are familiar with Microsoft Update. It can be set to automatically download and install updates. The first that many people know about this is the nagging pop-up that you need to restart your computer!

But Microsoft Update only updates the Microsoft products and some drivers on your system. It won't download and install updates for games or Java or Adobe Reader or any of those little utilities that we find so useful. Sometimes, but not always, these have their own updater programs built-in. But you can never be quite sure if you have the latest version of everything.

Linux has the same automatic update checking, but you'll only get the nagging restart pop-up for kernel and proprietary driver updates (usually graphics and wireless cards). An advantage of the Linux update system is that when it notifies you of updates, the whole system is updated, everything. If it's part of your distribution, it gets checked.

Because Linux is Free and Open Source, anyone is allowed to distribute it. Many of the major ISPs maintain a mirror copy of the latest Linux distributions and updates on their local servers. If you are a customer of that ISP, you may have access to that mirror and it may not affect your monthly download limits.

Read on to find out how to set your system to a local mirror...