Does anybody know the command line to find out what patches were installed on Ubuntu? I did not install any additional package, only the main software. I looked up the Ubuntu documentation and only found the command line that lists the applications installed.
Thank you!
Check apt history:
less /var/log/apt/history.log
This will tell you about installation activity.
in a wide sense, a patch is a diff file that you can apply to source code. if and how you deal with the patched source code is not documented centrally in ubuntu, since you're free to compile it and do whatever you like with it. also, there's no registry or so that stores the list of every installed tool. some things are just copied via make install to /opt or /usr/local so that it's hard to track updates to software like this.
Strictly speaking there are no patches installed on Ubuntu, but new packages that replace (upgrade) older ones, preserving configuration files. The logfile /var/log/dpkg.log contains information on new and upgraded packages.
The debian packages ask for inclusion of a Changelog. They can be found at /usr/share/doc/<packagename>. There is a also a nice tool named apticron that sends you by email a summary of pending package upgrades on your system on a daily basis.
