Ubuntu notes

I like Ubuntu. Every distro has its quirks. I like working with Ubuntu quirks more than any others.

what security updates do I need?

Report which packages need security updates:

apt-get update
apt-get --dry-run upgrade | grep "^Inst" | grep "-security"

unknown group in statusoverride file

This has only happened to me once, but you may also see an error like this when using a package manager:

dpkg: syntax error: unknown group `Debian-exim' in statusoverride file 
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

This is due to a faulty package removal. The package maintainer may have forgotten to remove the override when uninstalling a package. Usually it is safe to fix this by manually running something like the following:

dpkg-statoverride --remove /etc/exim4/passwd.client

How to unmark all packages marked to be upgraded in aptitude

If you hit 'U' to mark all upgradable packages to be you may change your mind and decide that you don't want to risk upgrading 20 different system critical packages. The trick is that it difficult to convince Aptitude to forget about these queued packages. You can select each one and hit '-' to unmark them, but that can be a drag is you have a lot of them in the list. Oddly, aptitude does not provide a way to unmark them all from inside the curses GUI, but you can easily do this from the command-line:

aptitude keep-all

selecting text in Aptitude

Aptitude takes control of the mouse which disables xterm mouse text selection. To override this simply hold SHIFT while you select text with the mouse.