this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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New debian user here. I'm using sway and have a script in my waybar config to look for upgrades and indicate if any are available. However, it typically doesn't find anything because I first need to run a sudo apt update first.

I don't really want to figure out someway to do a sudo through this script and was curious how gnome finds updates without me needing to enter a password.

It looks like I can use unattended upgrades to do the apt update.

https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades

though I don't want it to do upgrades until I do a sudo apt upgrade after being notified of upgrades. I created a 02periodic file in /etc/apt/apt.config.d as indicated, but I only included the lines

APT::Periodic::Enable "1";

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";

Will this run an apt update every day for me? Is there any issue I'm unaware of in doing this? Thanks for any help!

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[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Why did you create it manually? You should just edit the existing file. And this can be done via sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades IIRC.

[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

On my system that file is /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades. You can read description of its parameters in comments in the /usr/lib/apt/apt.systemd.daily script. It does not require unattended-upgrades to work.

BTW I have unattended-upgrades enabled for many years on all my systems, both desktops and servers, and it never caused any troubles when only stable repos are configured.

[–] rescue_toaster@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

My system did not already have that 20auto-upgrades file. I went through the others in the directory and none seemed to contain those relevant lines. I just checked my other ubuntu system, which did have the 20auto-upgrades AND a 10periodic with the same lines, which is likely redundant.