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.

A new command line tool is coming in Celena BETA 018 called “apt”. It’s a very simple addition which merges commands from apt-get, aptitude and apt-cache. It also doesn’t require the user to type “sudo” in front of the command.

This tool will make life easier for command line afficionados who used to type a lot of APT commands.

For instance instead of typing:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo aptitude reinstall gnome-utils

sudo aptitude show gnome-utils

You’ll be able to type:

apt update

apt upgrade

apt reinstall gnome-utils

apt show gnome-utils

Supported commands include:

•  update
• upgrade
• dist-upgrade
• dselect-upgrade
• build-dep
• check
• install
• remove
• source
• clean
• autoremove
• autoclean
• search
• show
• changelog
• reinstall
• stats
• depends
• rdepends

As you can see there’s nothing new but it’s all about comfort. Of course if you prefer to use apt-get, aptitude and apt-cache they still will be there for you.