On 23/01/17 04:31, Peter Ross via luv-main wrote:
It really surprised me that the GUI was not sufficient to replace the command line here. I suspected a more obscure problem when I wrote the mail (and was a bit embarrassed when I realized that the stock-standard use of apt-get is fixing my problem, btw)
Peter, Not sure which desktop you have installed, but I'm guessing you were running synaptic (a gui for the package manager). In synaptic you would typically press the refresh button (Brian mentioned this) to update the package list, you shouldn't need to use the command line. I know in the past synaptic would also notify the user when newer packages were available (at least under gnome), so it must have been automatically doing updates (perhaps on startup?). There is an option in the preferences to change whether the updates are automatic. If this is a machine you are using for yourself as a desktop (or experimentation), it would be worth at some point upgrading to Debian 8 (which is about two years old now), or even Debian 9 which is likely to come out in a few months. I agree that novice users shouldn't need to use the command line for basic functionality; if I was able to replicate your issue on a current version of Debian then a bug/feature report would be in order. regards, Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65