LMDE Updates

[timmn1]

To keep an extremely long story short, I was doing something, and ended up running dselect in Root Terminal.

Now, dselect found a bunch of updates that Update Manager seemed to be unaware of, and I installed them. They seemed to solve a number of other problems I was having.

Which brings me to my questions:

Why did Update Manager not know of these updates? I thought they were using the same repositories.

If Update Manager can't keep the system updated, is there another program out there that I should be running, other than dselect, to keep it updated?

[DetroitGeek]

I'm here searching for the same answer. I see my notifier telling me I have 20 updates but the MintUpdate screen tells me I have 4. Checking the preferences of Mint Update I see levels 4 and 5 turned off, so thinking that's what was hiding the difference I turned them on. That didn't change anything, MU still showed 4 updates, so I turned them back off. What happened to the other 16?

--After the fact--

After browsing the forums I found our answer at http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=58089&hilit=mintupdate and it makes perfect sense. Either wait for the maintainer to approve the updates at the LMDE level where MintUpdate will show the updates a few days later or run:

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sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get autoclean

, which overrides the Maintainers decision and gets all of the updates available. There is also a discussion on the difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade that needs attention.

[k3lt01]

You should be very careful running "autoremove". If you don't know what you are doing to could render your system unusable.

[mads]

timmn1, your question is answered in Linux Mint Debian's release notes (http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_debian.php):

"Known problems in Linux Mint Debian
...
Update Manager
The Update Manager used in LMDE is the same as the one in other editions of Linux Mint. No adaptation or changes were made yet to accomodate it to the rolling nature of LMDE.
..."

The best way to update LMDE is an ongoing discussion: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=58089&hilit=mintupdate
From what I have understood the preferred method to update LMDE is:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

[sgosnell]

Or you can use an alias to make it easier. I have an alias set up as

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 alias update='sudo apt-gtt update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade'

which allows me to just type 'update', enter my password when prompted, and get a full update. Aliases are very useful tools.

[timmn1]

mads,

Thank you for that link, for some reason, it didn't show up when I searched.

[mads]

mads, Thank you for that link, for some reason, it didn't show up when I searched.

No problem mate! As you say: Someday, maybe I'll figure out exactly what the hell I'm doing.