Hi, I have just done a fresh install onto a Del Latitude, but the update manager does not work, it shows the welcome page where you can choose your level of update, but everything else on the page is greyed out except the close button at the top, all the file, edit, view etc menus greyed out.

any idea's how to get this working properly. I have tried install with Mate and Cinnamon, but neither of them work.

Any ideas what's wrong here?

Have you tried using apt-get? If it doesn't work, it might return some errors to the terminal that will shed some light on this.

Also, from the shot-in-the-dark department, you might check your /etc/apt/sources.list file to make sure it's not pointing to the install CD/DVD.

please be aware that using 'apt-get upgrade' directly on mint distros circumvents their own updating/grading mechanism (with these numbered & colored boxes).
to what extent, i was not able to ascertain after numerous web searches.
it seems mint documentation is somewhat outdated...

hopefully someone who knows mint can answer how an apt command line upgrade differs from linux mint's gui upgrade tool?

===========

i also installed mint for a friend recently, and noticed it took a long time to get the new repositories from the network.
i wasn't sure if the problem is on my side; but have you tried to wait it out?

Thanks for the replies, I have done apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, that does work fine, I was more concerned with what ondoho says. It seems a little strange that the update manager won't get past this initial welcome screen though. I have looked at the preferences and then tried again, but still, there is an icon in the task bar telling me there are upgrades and click on that or choose update manager from the menu and still stuck on welcome screen asking to choose an update policy.

It's a shame as Linux mint is the only os that runs on this thing currently, I tried Debian, but it was so slow (5 mins to open a right click menu) I put mint back on it.

I'd just like to add, this is a fresh Linux Mint Cinnamon 32 bit install, not 64-bit.

Oh deary deary me, I have found the problem, the screen is too small on this little netbook, pressing tab got me to the apply button that is below the level of the screen, all working nicely now.

on a side note:
what you describe there are differences in desktop environments, not ditributions.
debian defaults to the rather heavy gnome desktop, cinnamon is a little lighter; you could try Xubuntu or Lubuntu and probably get even more out of the machine.
or some other even lighter distro. maybe bunsenlabs.

however, if it has one of those 1024x600 screens, there is no solution for some dialog windows leaving the screen area.

Thanks for your reply, the machine was a very cheap small laptop purely for coding and nothing else, and mint works ok on it, to be honest, it might well be worth going for a command line only distro at some point.