Turn off Automatic updates in Ubuntu 11.10

Ubuntu has been one of  the most popular distros in the world of Linux. It has made common man to opt for Linux over windows which has been very significant in a revolutionary way.

You must have noticed that whenever you boot up your system with ubuntu automatic updates automatically pops up from nowhere. After if you try to connect to Internet the speed is drastically slow. People using 3g connection might not be able to notice that, but there are people who are still using 2g connection including myself. Well in that case after your system has booted and you connect to Internet, it starts searching for updates. That uses a lot of bandwidth and you would surely not want to waste that with already pathetic Internet speed.

So I decided to somehow turn off the automatic update of Ubuntu 11.04. Below mentioned are the two ways that helped me get rid of automatic updates.

Open /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic file in any of your favourite editors and you can see line mentioning

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists “1”;

We just need to replace that numerical '1' to '0'. Check the below screen-shots

This is what the file looks like

Change it to what below screen-shot shows.

We can also go the other way in a more user-friendly way or we can say the GUI way. Open up the update-manager and look for the settings button at the bottom of the window. Click on settings and refer the below screen-shot where it clearly shows that the option “Automatically check for updates” is set to “Never”.

It is not at all difficult to change the ways and mend them according to you and Linux is the best bet which lets you that flexibility. Cheers !!!