[ale] AARG! Manual software updates, Sun Java, LibreOffice, help

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 11/05/2011 09:02 AM, Ron Frazier wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been going through my routine pc maintenance procedures, updating 
> everything which connects to the internet for every login on every 
> computer, checking security settings, doing backups and such.  One of 
> the things I'm trying to get away from by using Linux is the Windows 
> pattern of having to update everything in the system manually, which is 
> very time consuming.  I'm running Ubuntu 10.04, and, for the most part, 
> the Apt / Synaptic package manager system handles the updates.  I have 
> two anomalies that are really bugging me.
> 
> First is LibreOffice.  I have the following PPA installed:
> 
> http://ppa.launchpad.net/libreoffice/ppa/ubuntu
> 
> I check on the http://www.libreoffice.org/ website and the latest 
> version is 3.4.3.  However, the latest version in my package manager is 
> 3.3.2.

The reason for that is because security fixes and the like are
backported to the distribution's version.  Nearly every distribution
provides patches to the upstream software that they provide; Debian, Red
Hat, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and just about every other distribution does this.

For all of the above *other* than Gentoo (which is a rolling-release
distribution), there are typically many more patches in the distribution
itself, because they are quite change-averse.  This means that when a
security vulnerability has been identified and fixed, they will take the
patch and "backport" it (that is, apply the patch, or even patch the
patch before applying it in order to adapt it to the version of the
source they are using) to the distribution package.  This means that
they can reduce the amount of code change, as they only backport the
security fixes.

In theory, this is nice.  In reality, distributions tend to fall behind
in the backport process, and they are very specific about what qualifies
as a candidate for patches to backport.  So things that you may consider
important, your distribution may not, or vice versa.  This will, of
course, vary based on distribution (at least, for most packages).

> Second is the Sun / Oracle JRE.  I have the following PPA installed:
> 
> http://ppa.launchpad.net/sun-java-community-team/sun-java6/ubuntu

If you're going to use the Oracle JVM, why not just download the
self-extracting file.  Save the file to /opt, chmod +x it, extract it.
Append /opt/jre1.$VER.$VER_$UPDATENO/bin to your path, and if you want
the plugin, symlink it to the Mozilla plugin directory.  That's all
there is to it.  To update, repeat, and update both PATH and the plugin
symlink, and you're good to go.

> At the moment, I don't really want to debate the merits of the Sun / 
> Oracle JRE versus OpenJDK.  I need the Sun / Oracle version so it will 
> be fully compatible with a Java programming book I'm going to be going 
> through.  The latest recommended version of the Sun / Oracle JRE is 
> 6-29.  The latest version in my package manager is 6-26.  A little 
> Googling around seems to indicate that they've completely removed the 
> Sun / Oracle product from the repositories and PPA's.

You're rather unlikely to run into compatibility issues for introductory
or even common libraries between these two.  Other, more difficult stuff
is going to be where you may run into issues.  Even so, if you do find
an issue, that's good on multiple fronts:  you learn about an API that
is currently not universally available (good to know) and you can check
to see if that's a known issue (and if not, file a report so that it
becomes one).

I used both Sun JVM and IcedTea to run things when I was doing my Intro
to Java programming class (textbook was from Deitel and Deitel, and
actually went pretty deep into Java's standard library, including GUI
programming).  I even tested some of my programs on Windows.  They ran
correctly on all three environments (Sun/Windows, Sun/Linux, IcedTea/Linux).

> This is very frustrating.  The accepted procedure seems to be a VERY 
> long and tedious manual uninstall and reinstall process, much longer 
> than in Windows.  And, I still wouldn't get auto updates.  So, the next 
> time things are updated again, I'll have to do all of this again.

I haven't installed LibreOffice by hand, Gentoo does an excellent job of
keeping things up to date (actually it keeps the Oracle JVM up to date
as well, you just have to download the file from Oracle yourself).

You need to decide what is more important to you: up-to-date software,
or software that is predictably stable (in the sense that it is not
going to change drastically from the date the distribution was
released).  But, if you leave the path that your distribution provides,
you can count yourself out of automatic updates; they're not going to
happen if you decide that you want to do things yourself.

For LibreOffice, you *could* use a PPA, but I would not.  You're going
to be better off using the release packaged with the distribution.
Because it is a core component of, for example, Ubuntu, it will receive
security updates.  (You can subscribe to a mailing list to receive
notifications of them, if you want, as well.)  For Ubuntu, security
updates are backported to all Ubuntu versions that are still in support
and have versions of the software affected by the problems.

For Java, downloading takes 5 minutes and installing (or updating, which
is virtually the same thing) takes 5 minutes more.  I saw that you
referenced some multiple page howto or something, but I don't see why
such a long-winded document is necessary to install Java.  It's simply
not that complex a task.

	--- Mike

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