In our second session of Terminal Tuts, we shall learn how to install updates on the Ubuntu-based distros by command-line using Terminal. We shall also see how to only install security updates and not all regular updates by command line. This is especially useful when you are pushing the updates via remote login where the use of terminal shines!
Install Updates on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and elementary OS from Terminal
Launch Terminal and enter the following commands:
Step 1: Fetch the updates available for your computer using apt-get update command:
sudo apt-get update
Step 2: You can then use apt-get upgrade command will upgrade the current packages
sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 3: Finally use the distribution upgrade command. This command also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages. It will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the expense of less important ones if necessary. The dist-upgrade command may, therefore, remove some outdated and broken packages.
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Install only Security updates on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and elementary OS from Terminal
At times to save time on remote machines, you may want to launch terminal and only install the security updates.
You can use the unattended upgrade command which will silently install updates without user interaction.
sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades
Instead, if you want to have an interactive installation, use the display parameter:
sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades -d
I am still running Mint 13. I want to upgrade to 14, run all updates, then upgrade to 15, run all updates, then 16, 17.3 and 18.3 with updates for each. I have all the Mint versions burned from ISO files to DVDs. I have copied all of them to a hard drive, each in a different folder, Mint 14-64, Mint 15-64, Mint 16-64, Mint 17.3-64, and Mint 18.3-64. Will this work? If so, what commands should I use? I assume they would be similar to what you show, but would specify the source drive and folder name for each.… Read more »
Thanks for the tutorials, Kumar. Informative and straight to the point.
hi im new to Linux Mint. My update manager is not responding. It indicates that there is/are updates available using the “x” icon but whenever I click it it said that the public key is not available. I used to be working ok, but after an update recently, it went kaput…. any suggestion?