Another reason that's a good idea is security updates. If you download
and install private "off piste" binaries, it's down to you to track when
security issues are found with them and go off and update them. Whereas
a periodic "yum update" will pull in security (and other) updates
automatically.
It might be worth here pointing out for linux newbies that there is a
real fundamental difference between linux and windows.
In the windows world, updates from Microsoft only cover OS updates, and
perhaps office if you have it. nothing else.
In linux, things are very different. Your fedora installation will be
already set up with various 'yum' repos. These are repositories which
contain various 'rpm' packages which can be installed on your machine
(rpm is just a format for packages - google for it if you want more
info). These repos provide
1) Access to lots and lots of applications that where not installed by
default.
2) updates to those packages.
Because linux is OSS, these repos can contain al sorts of packages. For
instance firefox and thunderbird are in there. If you don't have them
isntalled, just run (as root)
> yum install firefox thunderbird
and thats it...
Also note that there are various GUI frontends to yum, which you can
also use (yumex, pirut, kyum) to name a few. I suggest giving yumex a try
> yum install yumex
Finally, the 'official' Fedora repos only provide packages which for
legal reasons Fedora can provide. There are many others available in
other 'third party' repos which provide more things. (like mp3 support
etc.). Check out livna and atrpms for details, or ask here ;)
basically, these days I rarely find anything I need that I cannot get
via yum. Anything you get by yum will benefit from automatic updates,
whenever you run
> yum update
or trigger an update from any of the various GUI frontends.
cheers Chris
Thunderbird, like Firefox, is a high profile target for security issues
because a lot of the codebase is shared with the Windows versions, which
are pretty popular. One of the biggest benefits of specifically Fedora
is that Redhat are very hot on getting security updates out quickly.
-Andy
