update manager

[Mario Vukelic]

On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 20:17 +0000, norman wrote:
> Perhaps I did not explain myself very well. I assumed that when there
> are updates to be downloaded, if I clicked on Update Manager in
> System/Administration the window that appears would show any updates
> waiting. 

Oh, I misunderstood. I thought the little notification icon in the panel
does not come up - this comes up quite often on the list, and usually it
is caused by the notification area missing.

> If I open a terminal and use sudo apt-get upgrade followed by
> sudo apt-get update and I get an icon in the top panel showing that
> there are updates the Update Manager window is still empty. However,
> when I click on the icon in the top panel the Update Manager window
> which opens does show the updates. This seems quite odd to me.

I usually have to press the "check" button. It probably depends on when
you look: AFAICT the repositories are updated twice a day (might depend
on the particular mirror you use), and I think the update manager checks
them once a day, at a regular time that is however different per
machine. I think the particular time is decided at installation time
(and probably saved somewhere in a config file) and spread out over the
day to take load off the machines.

Another influence may be your settings in System -> Administration ->
Software Sources -> tab Updates -> heading Automatic Updates.