These are two fairly simple hacks I whipped up late one night in an effort to resolve a feature request logged against the GeoIP packages I maintain for Fedora Extras, as the stock geoupupdate(1) doesn't deal with the free databases Maxmind provide.
Their function is fairly simple - go out and fetch an updated copy of the appropriate GeoIP .dat file, move the old one out and uncompress the newly-fetched file in place.

Requirements are fairly minimal:

• Perl (no, really!)
• gzip (part of most base installs anyway)
• Perl's LWP::Simple module (often packaged as "perl-libwww")

Usage:
It's best run from cron, usually on the first or second of the month when Maxmind update the files.
The scripts take no arguments; if you want to know how they work, read the source!
Download (Right click and "Save As" advised, remove the .txt when downloaded):
fetch-geoipdata.pl - This fetches the free GeoIP "lite" database (~2mb)
fetch-geoipdata-city.pl - This is for fetching the GeoIPCity Lite database (~25mb)

TODO:

• Merge the scripts into one generic fetcher
• Logging (syslog?) and better error handling
• More testing - it works for me, but I'm the only one testing it so far :-)
• Configuration options / getopt argument handling