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- After boot mintupdate icon shows that my system is up to date.
- I right click the mintupdate icon and choose refresh
- mintupdate icon insists that my system is up to date.
- I open a terminal, and run "aptitude update;aptitude full-upgrade"
- aptitude full-upgrade offers to upgrade:

apt apt-transport-https apt-utils hal libglib2.0-0 libglib2.0-data
libglibmm-2.4-1c2a libhal-storage1 libhal1 libmysqlclient16
libpangomm-1.4-1 mint-translations mintbackup mintdesktop mintinstall
mintnanny mintupdate mintupload mountall mysql-client-core-5.1
mysql-common mysql-server-core-5.1 ubiquity-slideshow-mint-main

- and now, incredibly, mintupdate icon tells me "20 recommended updates available"

Below is a log of mintupdate. The first two groups of lines are my attempts to make mintupdate see the updates by clicking "Refresh". The last group of lines appeared AFTER I run "aptitude update".

++ Launching mintUpdate in user mode
++ Testing initial connection
++ Connection to the Internet successful (tried to read http://www.google.com)
++ Starting refresh
++ Auto-refresh timer is going to sleep for 15 minutes, 0 hours and 0 days
++ Connection to the Internet successful (tried to read http://www.google.com)
++ Successfully downloaded new safety rules using proxy: None
++ System is up to date
++ Refresh finished


++ Starting refresh
++ Connection to the Internet successful (tried to read http://www.google.com)
++ Successfully downloaded new safety rules using proxy: None
++ System is up to date
++ Refresh finished
++ MintUpdate is in tray mode, performing auto-refresh
++ Auto-refresh timer is going to sleep for 15 minutes, 0 hours and 0 days


++ Starting refresh
++ Connection to the Internet successful (tried to read http://www.google.com)
++ Successfully downloaded new safety rules using proxy: None
++ Found 20 recommended software updates
++ Refresh finished



Is this how mintupdate should behave?

Which version?

Mint 9 Isadora, fully updated

The way that mintUpdate has always worked is that it needs to be run with administrator rights in order to work. When you first logon it is running in 'user' mode as per your report. In this mode it doesn't always show all available updates, you need to click the icon and then it will ask for your password and switch to 'root' mode. There is a blog post from Clem that explains it better, but I don't have the link to hand. The solution is to prefix the Startup Applications entry with gksu , then it would automatically request your password when you first login, though you might prefer not to be asked which is why it starts in 'user' mode?

remoulder wrote:The way that mintUpdate has always worked is that it needs to be run with administrator rights in order to work.

Thank you for the explanation. I come to Mint from Kubuntu, where the update tray notification icon always shows updates no matter which user it runs under, and elevated privileges are required only to update the system, not to see if updates are available. So from my perspective, when the Mint icon says "Your system is up to date", it is lying.

gnopak wrote:when the Mint icon says "Your system is up to date", it is lying

I'm not disagreeing, there have been a few 'debates' about this behaviour