Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Removing update-notifier in KDE system tray on startup (Kubuntu 8.10)

[ Summary ]

This post describes removing the system tray icon for update-notifier [-kde] so that user will not be reminded every login that they should upgrade to the next distribution.
This is useful if you don't want the green update notification appearing when it isn't useful to upgrade your distribution (and when no updates actually exist).
** In my case, upgrading to Jaunty breaks my 3D acceleration I get with the ATI catalyst drivers.

[ Method ]

The update-notifier-kde executable (binary) is located in /usr/bin. To remove the system tray icon without the trouble of the 'apt-get remove dependancy hell' (in my case it removed network-manager as well), the simplest solution is to rename the executable.


sudo mv /usr/bin/update-notifier-kde /usr/bin/_update-notifier-kde


Now you can login without being tricked into thinking there are updates. To reinstate the system tray icon, just rename it back to the original file name and reboot/restart the display manager.


If you want to have your pc check for updates without the update-notifier, you may want to place the apt-get update && apt-get upgrade commands in a cron job scheduled for every week.

I hope this little tutorial has helped reduce the frustration that some experience with linux & video drivers. It's been bothering me for weeks. I would rather spend the next 3 months in school not right-clicking and closing the notifier every class.

1 comment:

dusoft said...

even better is just remove executable permission from the file:
sudo chmod -x /usr/bin/update-notifier-kde