mintUpdate is now stable and ready to be included in the upcoming Daryna.

Version 1.2 is compatible with Celena and Cassandra and solves the problem of un-educated upgrades.

Compared to the Ubuntu Update Manager, mintUpdate is faster, less intrusive (it doesn’t use notifications for instance), gives more information about packages and is more configurable. It also focuses solely on packages updates and not on distribution upgrades.

Packages are divided into 5 levels corresponding to the level of risk they represent for the user. For instance a level 5 update can potentially affect the stability of the system. With mintUpdate users choose which level they trust, which are selected by default, and even which levels are visible. If a user doesn’t want to be notified about level 4 or 5 updates, he simply won’t see them. This system gives more power to the user and at the same time more information.

All Cassandra/Celena users still using the Ubuntu Update Manager are invited to get rid of it and to install mintUpdate 1.2:

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5813

The decision to remove the Ubuntu Update Manager in Celena was controversial and generated a lot of comments. Some of these comments were quite aggressive and I personally felt bullied by some of them. I was surprised to even see people like Helios from computer4kids and lobby4linux join the crowd and send cynical criticism. To these people: I hope you now see the big picture. You can disagree with the dev team on their decisions but you should know we work hard at making Mint better, and nothing else. I personally won’t accept that kind of bullying in the future.

Clem

mintUpdate will be ready for Mint 4.0 Daryna. The diagnostic features of the tool are already working and the team is currently implementing the preferences box. Only the upgrade mechanism based on APT remains. Here are two screenshots of what the current mintUpdate looks like:

A new tool called mintUpdate is being designed at the moment as a replacement to the Ubuntu Update Manager and its notifier.

The new tool should be ready for Daryna (Mint 4.0). It will look like the Ubuntu Update Notifier/Manager but with a few differences:

• Security Updates will be tested by the Mint developers before they become available in mintUpdate
• Updates will be sorted in different categories and given different levels of confidence and emergency
• The Mint team will be able to input additional descriptions for the updates than the ones included in the packages themselves and these descriptions will appear in mintUpdate
• Some security updates (kernel, xorg.. etc) will appear but not cause notification and they won’t be selected by default. Related risks will also be described to the user when they get selected.

The purpose of this tool will be to give automatic security updates to users without letting them perform uneducated upgrades.

In Cassandra and previous releases the Ubuntu Update Manager was bringing security updates but this could potentially break Linux Mint.

In Celena, stability was improved and the Ubuntu Update Manager was removed.

In Daryna we’ll introduce mintUpdate and provide the best out of both worlds: stability and security.

The great advantage of mintUpdate will also be that we’ll be able to do that without managing our own repositories, just by following and testing updates and providing meta-information to mintUpdate about them.