Package updates in 2.6

Sorry if this is a newbie question, but I'm just getting started. I saw on the downloads page that under 2.5 it says NOT to update any of the Ubuntu LTS packages, however 2.6 is built on Debian. When starting the machine up, Debian is giving me alerts that there are X amount of packages with updates, some of which are LinuxCNC updates. Which of these updates are safe to install and which should be ignored?

That is a trick question. Basically it would be safe to download all not related with LinuxCNC so that no change on your current configuration is needed. The problem is to know what is related with LinuxCNC as it uses a lot of different parts of the installed Linux.
You can also skip updating all. I doubt that you need to update any package, unless you saw a problem in general with Linux. I normally ignore updates if I feel that my machine is working stable.

Is it not recommended to keep LinuxCNC updated to the latest version? I just thought it was odd that the LinuxCNC updates also appeared in there so I wasn't sure if it's changed in 2.6 with not updating.

So that brings me back to the initial question, which updates in update manager should be selected?
Should I ONLY select the linuxcnc, linuxcnc-dev, linuxcnc-doc-en packages or should I be updating all available packages?

justinj wrote:

So that brings me back to the initial question, which updates in update manager should be selected?
Should I ONLY select the linuxcnc, linuxcnc-dev, linuxcnc-doc-en packages or should I be updating all available packages?

The advice for Ubuntu was because the package manager would try to 'update' the kernel, which would delete the rtai kernel and leave the system unable to run linuxcnc.

This should not happen with the Debian distro, as the stock debian kernel is 3.2.0-4 ish and the rtai kernel is 3.4.9

I would just use the update manager, but scroll through the list first, checking there are no packages related to linux-kernel-image, kernel headers etc
The other stuff should be OK and some like bash and openssl needs updating because there are security flaws in them

regards

ArcEye wrote:

The advice for Ubuntu was because the package manager would try to 'update' the kernel, which would delete the rtai kernel and leave the system unable to run linuxcnc.

This should not happen with the Debian distro, as the stock debian kernel is 3.2.0-4 ish and the rtai kernel is 3.4.9

I would just use the update manager, but scroll through the list first, checking there are no packages related to linux-kernel-image, kernel headers etc
The other stuff should be OK and some like bash and openssl needs updating because there are security flaws in them

Thanks for that
Being new to this I didn't want to spend time trying to fix something that I didn't realise I had broken by way of updates etc!