How to Handle Linux System Updates

So you decided to migrate to Linux from Windows or MAC either out of necessity or curiosity.  You got a Linux OS installed up and running on your latest hardware.  Are you all done?  No.

One of the first things you need to do, is change the mirror to a local server.  This should speed up the receipt of your updates.

The next thing you should do is clone your Linux OS in its current state.  That way, if you install any future updates that break functionality that worked before, you at least have a backup of the OS when everything was working fine.

So far, I've been successful using Clonezilla.  Although, going through the process may not seem very user friendly or graphically pretty, it's worth learning to spare you any future anxiety.  I will walk you through tutorials and write a special piece on it to relieve your anxiety for attempting something foreign looking to an average user.  Keep in mind, that your distro may have their own backup tools, which you may want to try out but not completely rely on at first.  I have used the backup tools for some distros with mixed results.  The data backups seem to work fine but the backups of the entire operating system and software packages weren't always clean.  That is why I recommend using Clonezilla.

When you go through the process of accepting updates, you can select which packages you want to accept.  It also helps to review each package description and what other packages they depend on, in case you experience an issue from accepting the package.  For a more tech savvy user, you want to note these things so that you can give as much detail for a bug report to be sent to your Linux distro and the package maintainer of the third party package you installed.  For example, the Cheese Webcam software I downloaded on my Linux Mint 14 and Ubuntu 12.04 distros were working fine until I accepted some updates a few months ago.  The Cheese Webcam was unable to record video.  When I accepted Ubuntu updates recently, it fixed my Cheese webcam issues.  However, I am still unable to get it working on Linux Mint 14.

So, what I've learned from this situation is to run tests on newly installed distros to make sure everything is functioning properly.  Then clone that environment to get a good backup to restore to in the event that future updates break previously working functionality.