Where are release notes from security updates that were installed in the background?

My Update Manager is set up to download and release security updates silently in the background. Therefore release notes are no longer displayed. I wonder if there is a way to read the release notes later. How could I find out which updates were installed recently and what bugs are fixed?

Solution 1:

The results of unattended-upgrades are logged at /var/log/unattended-upgrades. Though this will not contain the changelogs; it will show you what has been upgraded. You can then use one of the methods mentioned by others to see the actual changelogs.

You might also be interested in the apticron package. It can be set up to email you about any packages on the system that need to updated. This email will include summary of changes in each package generated by apt-listchanges.

By default it will mail root. If you don't have this set to forward to a real account already, edit /etc/apticron/apticron.conf, to set the email address:

EMAIL="[email protected]"

Solution 2:

You can find information on most, if not all, security updates right here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/usn

Feeds are available for use in your RSS reader, or you can also subscribe to a mailing list. Both are linked to on that page.

Solution 3:

This is not as easy a proccess as it could be.

1. Identify the packages that have been upgraded

   In Ubuntu 11.04 go to the Ubuntu Software Centre, and look in the History section (from the left hand side) and then at the top filter to look only at Updates. This will show you what updates were installed when, and which versions to.

   In Ubuntu 10.10 do as above to identify which packages were upgraded and when, but it doesn't tell you the version numbers.

   In Ubuntu 10.04 you will need to use Synaptic's history function, because the Software Centre hadn't yet included this functionality.

2. Visit the Launchpad page for a package. For instance for update-manager this is at launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager. From the links in the top right of that page you can view the complete changelog (launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+changelog)