Scheduled use of Update manager and others
 

Hi,

I'm Barry and have used Linux Mint 11 (Katya) on and off for a few weeks now. I am very impressed with what I have found, and have slowly started to move over from Windows to Linux.

However, one of the issues that I could not resolve yet, was scheduled downloads. I have downloaded several download managers, but none of them have scheduling capabilities.

More important, however, is that I want to use the Mint Update Manager, Software Manager, and Package Manager in a scheduled fashion. My ISP provides for free downloads after certain hours, and I need to schedule those programs to download at specific times. Is this possible, and if so, how?

Thanks.

I have not found a scheduling download manager for Linux either (haven't looked very hard). You might be able to get your favourite windows product to work using wine.

Tools like Mint Update and Package Manager can generally be set to do downloads only after you have confirmed them. For example, in Ubuntu "Update Manager" Settings allow you to check for updates but only notify you - the check for updates is not a huge amount of data. That would solve half your need - to avoid large downloads during your ISP's limited times - but you would still have to manually start the downloads yourself (I hope it's not 2am). I can't think of a way to schedule it for later using the GUI.

But as you're probably finding out you can do just about anything with the command line. The at command will do the job here, and you'll need to run it with root permissions when you set it up (so that the root account will do the updates at the scheduled time). Something like:

- This form of at will wait for you to enter the commands to be scheduled and you'll need to press Control-D when you've finished.

Yes, at allows time formats like 'midnight'.

I wouldn't rush into this without thought - there may some catches - it would be better to run the downloads only and defer the installation but I'm not sure if you can do that with apt-get.

Thanks
 

Thanks SecretCode. I'll try that. And by the way, it's great to get the first response from a fellow South-African...

Aha!

You should fill in your location in your profile (if you want to).

What ISP are you with? When you mentioned limits on downloading times I thought, yes, we know about that kind of thing here. I don't have that kind of package but if it makes daytime speeds better it might be worthwhile.

double post / database error

double post / database error

Hi SecretCode,

I use the Internet at work a lot, so I don't need such a big package at home. I use the 8.ta 2 Gig package at R149. It also includes 1 Gig between midnight and 6am. I have not used that, so I thought this allocation might be good for updates. That's why I asked the question about scheduling updates.

Depending on your coverage, I can say that 8.ta is great so far. Where I live it runs circles around Vodacom's speed.

Ah. I'm guessing you don't have teenage kids. 15GB a month minimum and now trying out so-called "uncapped" (on ADSL of course ... that would be crazy on 3G).

Put this into a script:This will update the package database and download all updated packages, without installing them. This can be done later with your attention.
Look up the information for cron, which is used to schedule tasks on Linux, you can use that script with cron to download the packages.

The same way (using cron) you can schedule other downloads with wget. Look up the man-page for wget, especially the -i option, which will read URLs from a file and download them.

Hi, hes, your guess is quite right! My children are still quite small!

TobiSGD,

I think you gave me the answer that I needed. Thanks.

Being a newbie, I would have liked a GUI option, but I think it is time to start playing more with the terminal...

Thanks.