by ·1 Comment

Although functional mintUpdate 1.2 still has a few rough edges. Here are the list of planned improvements for mintUpdate 1.3:

  • a menu shortcut to be able to start mintUpdate manually
  • a better way to handle threads (exiting mintUpdate should also kill the auto-refresh process.. which it doesn’t right now)
  • a better logging system to keep a trace of things when they go wrong
  • auto-refresh in user-mode
  • process tracking and anti-collision system to make sure only one mintUpdate is running at the same time
  • better handling of synaptic and usage of apt-get when synaptic fails to start
  • self-packaging of the icons so that mintUpdate integrates better under KDE in the absence of Gnome icon themes

As you can see version 1.3 will mostly bring more stability to the tool and new features will be kept for future versions. These include the ability to define levels for the packages of your choice for instance.

by ·3 Comments

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