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This is a MATE panel applet to notify when software updates become available.

The notification is displayed in two ways: 
- by changing the icon of the applet
- by sending a notification to the notification-daemon


1. The applet can fetch information about available updates from various 
backends (depending on the underlying distribution). The exact backend is 
selected at compile time. You can either force a particular backend by 
specifying --enable-backend=... to ./configure, or let it chose one of the
available backends:

A. For all systems:
- package-kit is most preferred backend as it should handle transparently
any required update protocol.

B. For systems which use yum (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Scientific etc.)
but do not have package-kit:

- yum-updatesd is preferred (as it is used D-Bus to report status).
The availability of updates is checked by the daemon, which then broadcasts
over D-Bus. For better performance, change the check interval from 3600
to 600 second (see /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf).

- yum is used elsewhere (but it is ugly as we depend on counting output 
lines). Checks are performed each 10 minutes by querying all repos.

C. For systems which use apt (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint etc.) but do not have 
package-kit:

- apt-check from the update-notifier is preferred. Note that it only reads the
local database and does not check with repositories (like "apt-get update" 
does). Therefore, someone has to update the database (like, update-manager
on start-up).


2. The applet spawns a software installer to actually apply the updates. 
The exact software installer is detected at compile time. You can either force 
a particular installer by specifying --enable-installer=... to ./configure, or 
let it chose one of the available installers:

A. yumex - mostly found on systems which use YUM. 

B. gpk-update-viewer - mostly found on systems which use PackageKit. Note that
it may be packaged as a part of the 'gnome-packagekit'.

C. update-manager - mostly found on systems which use Update Manager to handle
software updates. 


IMPORTANT! This free softwarte is released with hope that it will be useful, 
but with no warranty of any type at all. Use it at your own risk. You are free
to distribute it as well as to modify it as long as you preserve the original 
License. See LICENSE file for details.