While playing around with Amazon EC2, I noticed that the Ubuntu images showed available updates at login (See pic)
How can I get my home installation to do this? I'm running 14.04.

My question is specifically in reference to packages/security updates. In the image, they are represented as "0 packages can be updated." and "0 updates are security updates." All other information showed up without the fix that I referenced as a comment to the duplication flag. I've discovered two solutions for the problem:
- Running tasksel allows the selection of the Basic Ubuntu server collection
- An abbreviated form of tasksel appears at the end of a fresh installation, which also allows the selection of Basic Ubuntu server