3.8 Installing Updates

As with most operating systems today, each particular release of the Ubuntu distribution continues to evolve after it has been released. This generally takes the form of bug fixes and security updates and, occasionally, new features that may be downloaded over the internet and installed on your system.

Best practices dictate that the first step after installing Ubuntu is to make sure any available updates are applied to the system. This can be achieved via the command-line prompt in a Terminal window using the apt package manager tool. To check for the availability of updates, right-click on the desktop background and, from the resulting menu, select the Open in Terminal option:

Figure 3-19

Within the Terminal window, run the following commands to gain root privileges and update the package list:

$ sudo su -

# apt update

If updated packages are available, the command will display output similar to the following:

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