I post in the newbie section because my skill levels are newbie. Am running Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS.

After downloading my updates, I get this two sentence message: "The computer needs to restart to finish installing updates. Please save your work before continuing".

I wish my OS would install automatically when I restart, but the message: "Please save your work..." tells me I have to go into terminal and type Ctrl + S. What folder do I put it in? Do I need to add any other commands?

If it is installed automatically, why doesn't OS they tell me instead of sending me on a wild goose chase?

The problem comes up because my attempts to install updates are not solving the problems I am having with my OS. In other words, the updates don't appear to work.

Hi blerohl,

I don't quite know why you believe you have to go into a "terminal" type "Ctrl + S" and all that, but if I understand the rest of your situation, I can perhaps help you with some additional understanding of system updates.

When you download a collection of updates that are provided by the folks that put together the distribution you are using, unless you specify what to include in those updates, the updates might include almost anything. The updates might include a new version of the so called "kernel", that is the main piece of the Operating System itself.

Rather than try to replace that piece while it's being used and risk causing problems, the installer program wants to put the new version of the kernel in place on the disk drive, then reboot the computer to load the new kernel from the disk drive.

The message "save your work" is a reminder not to reboot your computer before you save anything on which you are working. For example, if you were editing a file, you wouldn't want to allow the computer to reboot to load the new kernel, before you save the changes you made to the file you were editing, so you don't lose those changes.

I hope that helps.

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Thanks, Rigor. It does help. From your message it is clear that the installer does do it automatically, when I reboot.

Having said that, even someone as dumb as myself on computers, knows that I have to save my work before shutting down my computer. I guess it didn't occur to me that anyone would be working on a file while doing something as risky as an update. I always make sure I have nothing else open when getting ready to reboot.

Also, now I guess I will have to look elsewhere for the problems that plague my operating system.

Thanks again.

That's a standard message you'll get from any operating system before it does a reboot. It just means to save and close anything you might be working on before shutting down the OS.

What problems are those?

Excessively long time delay from the time I click on a link before normal packet transfer starts, a full 30 second time delay from my login until I get logged in instead of a normal 4 second time delay.

In addition, some commands never are fulfilled. For example I am in firefox, on a website where I want to send an email. I hit the "send" button, and nothing happens. After waiting 5 minutes, the message still isn't sent.

Do long delays like that happen for most websites, or just the one on which you are trying to send email?

Also, in case it's not a network problem, but a problem on your system, there's a command named top which you can run from a command line, to see which programs running on your system are taking a lot of system "resources", such as processor time, memory, etc. You can usually get out of the top command by pressing the q key. If you have it installed, or can install it, you might want to run it to see if something is taking a lot of processor time.

It varies. There is an undue delay for most websites, but the worst offenders are for sending an email while on a website, and also while trying to register a membership on some websites. Regarding these last 2 worst offenders, the process frequently fails completely.

I have no doubt that the problem is on my system.

Thanx for the top tip. Went into terminal and ran ps and top. I have an incredible number of tasks (which I take to be processes), 148 in number, although most are asleep, and when I ran top, had nothing else open or running.
With nothing else running, had 697,508 K of memory being used, which is way too high.

Rather than request a lengthy explanation as to how to fix this, if you can recommend a good tuorial that describes the ps and top utilities in detail, I will study it, and will probably still have some questions even after studying it.

Actually, please post the output of top & read this http://www.linuxatemyram.com/
For details of the cmds, use http://linux.die.net/man/

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That's normal. Most of those are system processes.

Keep in mind that the output of top tells you the total memory usage, including memory that has been buffered or cached but is not currently in use. You need to take the memory used, and subtract off the "buffers" and "cached" numbers to get the actual memory usage. Or you can use the "free" command and look at the row labeled "+/- buffers/cache" to get your real memory usage.

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Thanks for the tips, guys. Guess my memory is ok.



top - 03:26:45 up 2:15, 2 users, load average: 0.08, 0.11, 0.09
Tasks: 154 total, 1 running, 153 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.5%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.6%id, 0.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1945816k total, 1151400k used, 794416k free, 120684k buffers
Swap: 2003964k total, 0k used, 2003964k free, 619120k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1673 principi 20 0 109m 23m 17m S 3 1.2 0:19.32 unity-2d-panel
1117 root 20 0 49000 17m 8520 S 3 0.9 2:04.10 Xorg
1736 principi 20 0 98340 23m 10m S 1 1.2 0:09.25 unity-panel-ser
3757 principi 20 0 91100 14m 10m S 1 0.8 0:00.61 gnome-terminal
1674 principi 20 0 253m 53m 29m S 0 2.8 0:24.33 unity-2d-shell
1681 principi 20 0 50948 8940 6980 S 0 0.5 0:04.77 bamfdaemon
3820 principi 20 0 2856 1172 884 R 0 0.1 0:00.11 top
1 root 20 0 3664 2036 1336 S 0 0.1 0:00.56 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.16 ksoftirqd/0
6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.17 migration/0
7 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.02 watchdog/0
8 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.07 migration/1
10 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.12 ksoftirqd/1
11 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.98 kworker/0:1
12 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.02 watchdog/1
13 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuset
14 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
15 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kdevtmpfs
16 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 netns
18 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 sync_supers
19 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 bdi-default
20 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd
21 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kblockd
22 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_sff
23 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
24 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 md
27 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khungtaskd
28 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kswapd0
29 root 25 5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksmd
30 root 39 19 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khugepaged
31 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 fsnotify_mark
32 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ecryptfs-kthrea
33 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 crypto

BTW, is blabbing my user name all over this thread a security risk?

I had only two things open to get this result, firefox with this web page, and the terminal.

Mem usage is fine as per that link.
If username is on an internal system, should be ok; possibly a risk if its an external/web accessible system.

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Linux/Unix tend to use memory pretty efficiently, and can free up memory that may be shown in top as used, if it's internally marked as available.