billg wrote: > >My point is that mainstream customers of any potential retail Linux >product -- people who can be expected to care no more about how Linux >works than they currently do about Windows --- will want to see updates >come only from the company that sold them their OS. (They won't have a >clue about GPG's, so they'll ask "Just because the guy who wrote this >code has one of these GPG things, wy should I trust him? ") They won't be >trolling the web looking for new software nearly as much as current Linux >users do, but a smart company would dramatically reduce their customer >support woes caused by installation of "alien" code if they also offered >a collection of "approved" and "official" programs for download. What we have here is a frustrated windows users who wants to use Linux but thinks that ?the way Microsoft did thing? is the way computing should go. Anyway, billg, you?re right, we need a gui interface for yum and/or expand the capabilities of up2date. But the way Fedora Core and even the Redhat product get installed by default satisfies your argument. The user doesn?t have to now anything other that a red icon in the panel with an exclamation mark mean you have updates. Updates that come from a single server (or an official mirror of that server) hosted by the company that sold (gave) you the software. BTW: You would probably have more of a productive and influential discussion if you didn?t say things like ?Microsoft would do it? Demond