update manager
 

Hello Friends

In my current network I am running Debian 4.0 on most of my PC's, now the problem is that on some machine i get the update-software-manager iconwhen updates are due, and some machines I don't. I am new to linux and battling to find which file brings up that icon.

I will glady appreciate your help.

Please excuse me if I did not give more details, to my question.

I don't use a debian based system, but I think it works the same way. It's probably a service (or daemon) which start every boot time and connect to repositories to look for updates available. Check in your services manager, for the presence (or absence) of such a daemon, certainly with "apt" in its name.

There should be both a graphical and a config file way to do this. The graphical way probably depends on the desktop environment. If you are using Gnome it probably works similar to what I have in Ubuntu:

System -> Administration -> Software Sources

has a tab called Internet Updates where you can enable/disable it and select a period for updates. (Yeah, that's not terribly intuitive!)


If you prefer config files, I have a file called /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic with a line

This shows automatic update disabled. Changing the "0" to a "2", for example, would check for updates every second day ("1" for every day, etc.).

If you want to look under the hood and see how all of this works, there is (on my system) a script called /etc/crond.daily/apt which handles this. Along with everything else in this directory it should run once a day (regardless of your configuration).

Note: The leading two digits on the 10periodic file might be different in your distro. Don't worry about such a difference.