MEPIS Community Forum

What was the old KDE 3 app polling to find out if there were updates?

A python plasmoid is quite easy to build, either manually or with Kdevelop (install kdevelop and kdesdk) see this link: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-kde-plasmoids/?ca=drs-

but I really don't know the code to insert into the plasmoid. You can look at something like the simple CPU temperature plasmoid at kde-look.org to see how he greps the cpu temp (a .plasmoid file is just a renamed tar.gz, easy to extract), and one that displays the number of updates would show it on the desktop or on the taskbar.

Edit: Latest test versions of the applet:

I once had trouble with mepis apt-notify & had to add this to my /etc/sudoers file to make it work again. Maybe this points you in the right direction?

Could you do something with apt-show-versions -u, it can run as either user or root.

If you have upgrades available you get something like:
{I temporarily enabled squeeze so there would be upgrades available to show you}

You could grep on the word "upgradeable".

With some fancy scripting (beyond my ability) you might even be able to keep a count of how many occurances of "upgradeable" were grep'd.

How would the apt-get update as a regular user get performed? Could fakeroot do that?

There's an apt updating script in /etc/cron.daily that already is doing that, and it could be moved into the cron.hourly folder. I think that was what the old notifier was using.

The old mepis-aptnotify package installed a /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/15periodic-update file that contained:

Hello,

What about porting what PCLinuxOS uses? Eventhough it is rpm based they use synaptic package manager like we do. I am going to check to see if I could download an rpm and covert to alien and see what I can do from there. I will keep everyone posted.

Update: Looked in the their repo and did not see any obvious file. I believe the have one though and I think any accompanying scripts could be modified from rpm to deb based. I think I will leave this to those who have more experience, but let us know if I could be on to something.

regards,
tzefanyah

Yes, that's it, MEPIS 8 and some older version had that in sudoers. I can't try apt-get -s upgrade right now because I don't have anything to update on my system but I bet you could use some simple grep/cut commands to get how many upgrades are available.

Yes, that's it. Pehaps we can add some of those older apt-notify files to a apt-notify python plasmoid to get it working like the old one: the sudoers modification, the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/15periodic-update,and the plasmoid. It would require the plasma-python engine, but that's 180 K uncompressed.

Do you need to do anything else after having used visudo to add
to /etc/sudoers?

Do you need to logout, restart X, run some other command, etc.

I still get the following error message:

You are more knowledgeable than me about this. But shouldn't you be

root@mepis1

[kent@mepis1 ~]$ /usr/bin/apt-get -s upgrade
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13 Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?