mintUpdate not Refreshing

[jlitz77]

My refresh rate for mintUpdate is set at 1 minute, I haven't changed any of the icons and I haven't installed Automatix. The icon in my task bar shows as "System Up to Date" but when I manually refresh, items come up. Any suggestions?

[Husse]

Why every minute?
I personally put it at one hour - there is no need for anything more frequent I think, just a waist of bandwidth (yes I know default is 5 mins)
I just found out the same as you
I'll see if we can get an explanation

[cmost]

I don't know if this information is helpful but I find that Mintupdate often misses updates altogether. I noticed this behavior on Celena and Daryna. While I have Mintupdate installed on my workstation, being a creature of habit I usually do a weekly apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade in terminal. More often than not, updates will be available while Mintupdate happily reports 'system up-to-date.' This will occur even when the system has been on for days (which should give Mintupdate ample time to refresh itself many times.) I have Mintupdate configured to check every hour; I also have it configured to use the 'dist-upgrade' option. In spite of this behavior, Mintupdate does show updates on occasion. Apparently it fails to show some updates while picking up others? I find the concept of Mintupdate to be a far superior method of updating than the standard Gnome update manager. Many Mint users are new to Linux and they may not know what a particular package will do. They can, however, count to five (we hope!) Just the other day I read some threads on the Ubuntu forum about some kernel update causing havoc. I wonder how many of those users would have installed the update if it had been rated a 5. We should try to get Mintupdate in top form for future releases. Perhaps some feedback from users will provide the needed information to Clem.

[clem]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention Husse and I also agree with what cmost said (I usually do actually ).

Before I try to explain anything, I also think there's a bug somewhere as a manual refresh sometimes brings updates that are not brought by automatic refreshes.

Now, on to the explanation of why, to some extend, mintUpdate cannot know about these updates in some particular conditions

--> When you log in Gnome, mintUpdate is started with your user rights... it sits in the system tray and refreshes itself every x minutes.. but it doesn't have root permissions so although it can see what packages are available, it can't perform an apt update... so it could be sitting there for 4 days and never see updates until another program with root permission performs an apt update.

--> When you click on the mintUpdate systray icon here's what happens: a new mintUpdate is started as root (that's why you see a gksu dialog asking you for a password) and the first thing it does is to kill the older mintUpdate (which was running with user permissions). So you're now looking at a mintUpdate with root-permission and from there on, it still refreshes every x minutes... but this time it's powerful enough to perform apt update. Here's the dirty hack Anyway, basically remember that until you click on mintUpdate and input a password, it can't do apt update... and the minute you open it, after that it can.

--> Now, the bug I'm suspecting is that when you open mintUpdate as root (click on it in systray just after logging in Gnome).. it doesn't look, at that precise moment, like it's doing an apt update... because if you actually click the refresh button you see more updates than it initially came with...

Let's tackle this anyway and if there's anything else please report the names of the particular updates it sees and doesn't see and in which conditions. The key for me to be able to fix a bug is to easily reproduce it, from there on it's a very simple matter.

Clem

[Husse]

I just updated mintUpload (to 1.3) How long has that been there? ("undetected")