2 Beginner Basic Questions

[ed_e]

New to Linux and new to Fedora, so I have a coupl e of questions:

I don't have and I'm not planning to install any antivirus on my laptop, but what about spyware? I don't think Linux is too susceptible to spyware, but I'd rather ask someone who knows more about this.

I only have about 1.4 GB left on my laptop, so I'm reluctant to install Fedora updates. I'm probably not going to install any programs on here; I'm planning to use it for web & e-mail, Open Office, and learning only. Is there any way to find out the size of these updates to see if my laptop can handle it?

Thanks for your help.

[ilja]

Originally Posted by ed_e

I only have about 1.4 GB left on my laptop, so I'm reluctant to install Fedora updates. I'm probably not going to install any programs on here; I'm planning to use it for web & e-mail, Open Office, and learning only. Is there any way to find out the size of these updates to see if my laptop can handle it?

yum update

Will show you the size of the update ask whether you want to install or not.

[ccrvic]

Originally Posted by ed_e

what about spyware?

Malware doesn't tend to exist on *nix platforms - predominantly because

* users don't generally have enough privilege to install anything nasty
* vulnerabilities get patched very quickly

Originally Posted by ed_e

I only have about 1.4 GB left on my laptop, so I'm reluctant to install Fedora updates.

Install the updates. They are usually very important.

Vic.

[William Haller]

1.4 GB is still a huge amount of remaining space as far as the distribution is concerned. Remember that if you have the room to temporarily hold the rpm packages you download to update your box, the files from these packages will replace those already on your laptop. When the update is done, the rpm packages you downloaded are deleted, so there isn't much of a net change of space in most cases. The only exception are kernel updates where you must explicitly remove the old kernel yourself (keep at least one older working kernel around at all times).

Even if you don't have a lot of room (and this late in a Fedora release cycle there are tons of rpm updates that it will try to install), you can look at the list and just update a few at a time till you're done to get around most space problems.

For example, instead of yum -y update, try yum -y update gnome* or yum -y update kernel. It will still satisfy any dependencies it needs, but you can stage things so you don't have to download every RPM that has changed before starting anything.

[ed_e]

I began to update my system this one time and see where it'll end up. I left it alone while it was working, and I forgot the power management features in place. When I came back to check-up on it, my system had turned itself off. I don't know if that somewhat corrupted the update, but I'm guessing it probably did. I now have about 925 MB of space left, so it did take a chunk out of my hard drive. I've searched around the internet and doesn't seem like not much can be done with a "system restore" unless a backup was done ahead of time.
Any suggestions (keeping in mind I've been using linux for about a couple of days.)

Thanks.

[lazlow]

ed_e

You might try: yum clean all
It should (in theory) clean up any half finished jobs.

Good Luck
Lazlow

[William Haller]

As of this last night the mirrors still had a package error with bind-config, so in all likelihood it was just in the process of downloading packages and nothing happened to your system at all. The RPMs are there waiting installation - no need to delete them, just go ahead and turn off power management and try again. The space will be freed up once you wade through the update.

[ed_e]

I used the yum clean command and everything is back to where it was before updates. I'm going to start the update process over again and pay a little more attention to it.

Thanks for everyone's help!

[sebnukem]

You can also tell yum to clean the cache by default in /etc/yum.conf:
keepcache=0
so that you don't have to run yum clean all manually