I have had the same problem. Not having an update notifier is really annoying.
Fortunately, apt does update regularly without user intervention (see the apt entry in cron). Therefore a simple script that sends a message when there are updates available is sufficient.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sudowtf
if so I have this in my ~/.conkyrc which updates every 5 minutes showing available updates count:
Code:
Updates: ${execi 360 aptitude search "~U" | wc -l | tail}
|
I used this code in a script (included below) to count the number of updates. It uses the "notify-send" function to send a notice to the desktop. You get a notice that says: "There are x updates available." It will stay on the desktop until you click on it (to make sure you know there are updates). It will only appear if there are more than 0 updates.
I called the script update-notify.sh and made it executable with "chmod u+x update-notify.sh". I scheduled it to run at every system start. But you could schedule it to run every hour using cron. It should work for all desktops since it uses libnotify. The message is in English, but it is easy to translate to other languages. It is a very simple script but I hope it helps to solve your problem.
kind regards,
rhpv
Code:
#!/bin/bash
# Written by rhpv. 14-5-2015
# Update notify script to be run in cron as update notifier in Debian Jessie 8.0
# I hope gpk-update-icon will be ported to Debian stable soon.
# Text variables to allow for easy translation
there_are="There are"
updates_available="updates available."
# Count the number of updates by using the aptitude search for upgradable packages and counting the number of lines in the list
number_of_updates=$(aptitude search "~U" | wc -l)
# For testing purposes enable line below.
# number_of_updates=2
if [ $number_of_updates -gt 0 ] ;
then
notify-send "$there_are $number_of_updates $updates_available" -i system-software-update --urgency=critical ;
fi
