Update notifier displays notification and an icon in the panel tray area when Debian package updates are available. You can hover the mouse over the icon to check how many updates are available. It's especially suitable for Debian testing/unstable users, because it checks for updates very often. Developed and tested on Xfce desktop environment.
Once upon a time, there was this neat little package in the Debian GNU/Linux repository called update-notifier. It notified when package updates were available. Nowadays, the same named package in the repository is marked transitional, and is depending on quite a large number of other application and library packages. But, I wanted just the icon! So, I used that as an excuse to see how hard it would be to write something like that in Go. Not at all, it seems.
P.S. The original package seems to still be available in Ubuntu Linux here.
To compile:
- Go 1.6+
- libgtk2.0-dev
- libnotify-dev
To run:
- libgtk2.0-0
- libnotify4
- gnome-icon-theme (icons)
- apt-get (to check for updates)
- apt-daily.timer (or similar, to periodically update package lists in the background)
Just use go get.
go get github.com/zcalusic/update-notifier
Here's a simple desktop file you can save as ~/.config/autostart/update-notifier.desktop, so that application is
automatically started when you login. Just adapt TryExec directive to point to the location of the update-notifier
executable on your system.
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Update notifier
Comment=Notify when package updates are available
TryExec=/path/to/update-notifier
Exec=update-notifier
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=
Hidden=falseContributors are welcome, just open a new issue / pull request.
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright © 2016 Zlatko Čalušić
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