Linux Mint Forums

Is there a place in Linux Mint to set the timing of how often prompt for installation of available updates is displayed ?

I have just been manually updating each day but I can't seem to find parameter for setting a timed prompt for applying updates, am I missing it ?

Thanks.

You can do that with unattended-upgrades. But no, of itself Linux Mint does not have support for unattended upgrades, and the default implementation on Linux Mint, and our recommendation, is for you to review available upgrades in the Update Manager before installing them. If you want upgrades to be available less often, you can in the Edit > Preferences menu configure how often Update Manager checks (default is every 15 minutes).

Update Manager also has a set of rules to determine the level of an upgrade (see Edit > Preferences for details on the levels), with by default only level 1, 2 and 3 being offered for installation by the Update Manager. This reduces the risk for new users of becoming stuck with an unbootable system, from applying upgrades that might introduce new problems with their hardware (like kernel and xorg driver upgrades). Using unattended-upgrades is not configurable to the same level of detail, and hence you should probably not use it if you are not comfortable with the terminal and with rolling back package upgrades manually.

Anyway, here is one example of installing and using unattended-upgrades: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1217

Make sure to backup your "filesystem/var/cache/apt" folder regularly, all your updates get stored there. on new installation it will save you alot of time since its the OS updates and driver files as well.

I would not recommend to blindly and automatically apply updates either. Some updates may change the behaviour of installed programs and so may be unwanted without any previous review of what would happen. In order to safely update, you should rather be more cautious and think about installing "apt-listchanges" (and "apt-listbugs" on LMDE) which will inform you before doing anything that might deeply modify (at least) your config files.

xenopeek wrote:Anyway, here is one example of installing and using unattended-upgrades: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1217

Thanks for posting that. I was looking for a way in Mint to automatically install security updates only.