Figure out where the proxy settings are stored, and we can probably adjust the snapshot excludes file to keep them.

Synaptic could be a Recommends instead of a Depends. Those who install without Recommends are likely to have xterm installed. That could be a Suggests. Most people will get synaptic without trying.

This tests for synaptic and pkexec and falls back to xterm if they aren't both installed, and if xterm isn't there you get a popup error message.

if [ -e /usr/sbin/synaptic ] && [ -e /usr/bin/pkexec ] ; then
	pkexec /usr/sbin/synaptic --dist-upgrade-mode true --non-interactive
elif [ -e /var/lib/dpkg/info/xterm.list ] ; then
	sudo_allowed=$(sudo -n uptime 2>&1 | grep load | wc -l)
	# for sudo with no password
	if [[ $sudo_allowed -ne 0 ]] ; then
		xterm -fa mono -fs 12 -hold -e 'sudo "$command"'
	
	# for sudo with password
	elif $(groups $USER | grep -qs sudo); then
		xterm -fa mono -fs 12 -hold -e 'echo "Enter your password" && sudo "$command"'
	
	else
		xterm -fa mono -fs 12 -hold -e 'echo "Enter root password" && su -c "$command"'
	fi
else notify-send "Error:
You need to install synaptic or xterm."
fi

Note: I tried synaptic-pkexec instead of pkexec /usr/sbin/synaptic and the window came up for a fraction of a second and disappeared.
Correction: It now disappears with either line for starting synaptic. If I drop the 'non-interactive' the window stays, but it doesn't show the available upgrades. (You already knew that.)
I'm stumped. Where are you finding these synaptic options?

Oh, duh! Corrected correction: It won't show available upgrades if there aren't any. And the synaptic window will go away. Looks like this is working after all. (without the non-interactive option, the synaptic window stays up if you cancel the upgrades.)

My modified upgrade-yes is not working in my openbox/lxterminal. The terminal comes up empty and does nothing. Did someone else mention that this happened to them?

It does work if I use 'xterm -hold -e <command>'.

I'm having trouble getting x-terminal-emulator to run commands, even when I start it in a terminal, and this happens in openbox/lxterminal as well as xfce/xfce4-terminal.

x-terminal-emulator -e xclock works correctly in both systems.
x-terminal-emulator -e 'echo message' does not work. In ob/lx I get the blank terminal; in xfce I get nothing.

If I use the following for /usr/bin/upgrade-yes, it works with sudo nopasswd and with root. I don't have a sudo with passwd to test. I changed the command to gparted for testing, so it doesn't actually do the upgrade. Comment/uncomment the 'command=' lines as desired. One potential problem is that some terminals need the -hold or --hold option and some don't.

#!/bin/bash

#command="apt dist-upgrade"
command="gparted"
message="If user password fails, use root password"
sudo_allowed=$(sudo -n uptime 2>&1 | grep load | wc -l)

	# for sudo with no password
if [[ $sudo_allowed -ne 0 ]] ; then
	sudo "$command"

	# for sudo with password
elif $(groups $USER | grep -qs sudo); then
	x-terminal-emulator -e 'echo "$message" && sudo "$command"'

else
	x-terminal-emulator -e 'echo "$message" && su -c "$command"'
fi

Ron, what DE or WM and panel are you using?

Did you verify in a terminal (or in synaptic) on that same system that there are updates? I'm pretty sure the update-sync script, which runs 'apt-get update' is not working.  (You can check to see who's running that script with 'ps aux | grep update')

One more. Someone noted a high number of available updates in ascii this morning, so I added a count to show-updates.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

list=$(apt-get -s dist-upgrade | awk '/^Inst/ { print $2 }')

count=$(echo "$list" | wc -l)

notify-send "$count updates available:

$list"

exit 0

If you like it, I'll add this, too.

Test failed. I thought I could use yad to show the list if notify-send failed, but notify-send doesn't actually fail. It works, but without the notification-daemon, the message isn't delivered to the desktop. Oh well, the wm users might have to read a little bit. They should be used to it.

I didn't know anything about lxpanel's notifications, so I looked it up. Arch wiki pulled through again. I added notification-daemon, started it, and notify-send immediately works. 

For openbox, the .desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart don't do anything. I added the following lines to ~/.config/openbox/autostart:

/usr/share/update-notifier/update-notifier.py &
/usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon &

You're in luck. I backported audacity-2.2.2 last year for personal use, but I haven't actually used it. It does install in ascii. Packages for audacity and audacity-data are here if you want to try them. (amd64 only)
http://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/file … _packages/

I don't recall having any trouble backporting the package. Might be a good one to try if you wanted.

Got the newer iso.

I removed 'quiet loglevel=0 splash' and 'silent' from the boot command. The boot info is still covered by black screen and a progress bar. It hangs at 75% then drops down to 10% and repeats, but I don't know where it is in the boot sequence. Adding 'S' to boot to single-user gives the same result. md5sum on the downloaded iso is correct.

I tried booting in both virtualbox and qemu and got the same result. The older iso boots in both of those.

uefi: Lots of people still boot legacy mode for various reasons.
ram: Not everyone has 4G ram or someone might want to test in a VM and give it less ram.

sid/ceres still has 5.14. If (when) 5.16 moves into sid/ceres, it will likely migrate down into debian bullseye and our next release after beowulf. I think backporting kde would be a difficult task.

I've done a few upgrades from ascii to beowulf, and I haven't seen wayland. Did get a cryptic error message that mentioned wayland. Something warning me about trying to start synaptic as root, as if I wasn't supposed to do that. Didn't make any sense to me and I did finally get synaptic working the way I want.

aptitude why wayland (or whatever the main package is called) should tell you what pulled it in. I'd be interested to know, thanks.