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1

Update Manager keeps opening automatically and it's getting very annoying, especially when I'm using Gnome Shell. How do I make it stop?

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5 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

This may work for you. I haven't verified if it works in GNOME.

  • Open the Software Sources application.
  • Select the "Updates" tab.
  • For the "Automatically check for updates" option, select Never.

Picture of Software Sources window, with cursor selecting *Never* for 'Automatically check for updates' option

After this, you will have to open the Update Manager application manually.

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Thanks. This seems to work except when I did a apt-get operation but I think it was because of apt-get update. – user36655 Apr 29 '12 at 15:40
This makes it not update itself, but the GUI will still be popping up if anything else causes an update (e.g. like manually running apt-get update.) – Bryce Jun 27 '12 at 6:12
up vote 6 down vote

I found this post with the following instruction:

open gconf-editor, browse down to Apps -> Update Notifier, and uncheck the auto_launch option

OK, try this one. It's similar to the other answer but disables it instead of deleting it entirely. It might be safer for you to open the file in an editor and change the line by hand instead of the sed command that post uses.

The procedure, using an editor:

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Move to the autostart directory (cd /etc/xdg/autostart) and list the files there (ls).
  3. Find the startup program you want to run (in our case update-notifier.desktop) and open it in an editor (gksudo gedit update-notifier.desktop). Enter your password if necessary.
  4. Be careful not to change anything except this line. Find this line:
    NoDisplay=true
    and change it to:
    NoDisplay=false
  5. Save the file and exit.
  6. Reboot to make sure it worked.
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No auto_launch option is there. – decenter Nov 25 '11 at 18:46
Thanks. It worked. – decenter Nov 25 '11 at 18:58
up vote 1 down vote

In Precise, it is done using dconf now rather than gconf.

  1. Install dconf-tools

    $ sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

  2. run dconf-editor and navigate to com > ubuntu > update-notifier.

  3. Tick no-show-notifications

dconf-editor

And here's how to do it from the command line:

dconf write /com/ubuntu/update-notifier/no-show-notifications true
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up vote 0 down vote

In order to stop Update Manager from launching:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

To activate it again:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch true

Hope it helps ;)

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up vote -1 down vote

Should be 

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
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Didn't work. Thanks anyway though! – user36655 Mar 7 '12 at 20:51
Perhaps this works on Ubuntu versions prior to 12.04. – Eliah Kagan Jun 27 '12 at 6:15

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