One thing I have been missing since Gnome 2 was suceeded by the (IMO) horrible Gnome 3, is a tool tray notification icon for pending debian updates.
When someone continued Gnome 2 as MATE and MATE became available on debian, there was no notification tooltray icon to be found.
But now there is such a tooltray icon: pk-update-icon and since debian with MATE again is my primary desktop this I was something I was happy to discover.
When there are packages available, the icon looks like this:
Then you can either click on “Install updates” and use the GUI to inspect, and install the updates, or you can pop to a root terminal window do:
apt-get dist-upgrade
To install the pk-update-icon:
- the apt-line for “jessie-backports”First ensure that you have the apt-line for “jessie-backports”, by adding the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list :
deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie-backports main contrib non-free
- Update APT to get the index files for “jessie-backports”, do the following command in a root command line window:
apt-get dist-upgrade
- Install pk-update-icon from jessie backports, give the following command in a root command line window:
apt-get install -t jessie-backports pk-update-icon
Answer yes to the question about if the install should proceed
- Log out of the desktop and log back in, and the next time updates arrive the icon will show up, like in the screen shot above
