Since yesterday update manager states that there are updates. when I mouse over it says that there are 94 updates, I click on update manager icon it opens & starts scanning then does nothing, it doesn't say "Your system is up to date" & the curser doesn't show that it's working although there is hd activity.
The only software that is installed manually is Firefox & Google Chrome
Os Debian Squeeze
Acer Aspire 3620

what happens when you manually update, any errors? Or is it just GUI frontend that is having problems?

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If I try aptitude update, I get the message can't get exclusive lock is another package using it
same with opening synaptic.
I scanned var directory & have 2.2G free space also.

disable gnome update manager from starting in System > Preferences > Startup Applications. Untick update manager, relogin and try aptitude again. Basically , you need to kill the update manager as its holding lock on dpkg and for some reason won't release the lock. With luck, manual update will fix the issue.

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I'll try that.
Here's my sources.list & what update manager is doing.

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It appears your solution is working, after disabling update notifier I went to synaptic & marked the upgradeable packages and it's downloading now.
I'll post results as soon as it's done.

After marking upgrades it stopped with a message stating "Samba untrusted domaine defaults to no", so I umarked the samba upgrades & it is updating.
The update completed.
The 2 files I didn't upgrade were libsmbclient & libwbclient0 what affects might I have due to not upgrading them. Also I haven't enabled file sharing, yet so are they necessary for functionality of os? As of now this thread is solved & will be marked as so, just would like to know the possible affects of samba not being upgraded. Btw thank you rizzy.

Update after posting last question I went back to Synaptic & selected the 2 upgradeable packages & they did. I guess they couldn't be done along with the other packages.

GUI package management apps are all a pita.

aptitude update
aptitude upgrade
or
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Are much safer and tend to work much much better.

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Thanks craigvail
I had my machine set to notify of updates, once notified the commands wouldn't work, but now I know.
I can still set to recieve update notifications that way I know that they're available, if I have the same problem disable notifier.

1 members found this post helpful.

You can get update "notices" easily by just "reloading" synaptic. As opposed to Update Mangler, Synaptic has a pretty good track record and gives, particularly if configured correctly (default configuration is pretty good), much better information on what is being upgraded and what is not.

I disable Update Mangler as the very first step in setting up a new install of ANY Debian based OS. I do not want it to even check for updates let alone notify me. I certainly do not let it run updates.

Even if you allow it to notify you, I would highly recommend apt-get, aptitude or, if you want a gui to run update/upgrades, Synaptic to do the actual work. You will be a lot safer and have many fewer problems for very little extra effort.

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Thanks widget my system was set for notify, but only way I could get the update to run was to ignore samba upgrade, then after upgrade I was able to upgrade samba. The problem with my upgrade was "Samba defaulting to No" because of "untrusted domaine".

1 members found this post helpful.

+1

Purge all of the gui stuff like update manager and notifier and just use the cli apt tools. I prefer aptitude to apt-get but that's just down to personal choice. If you're running stable and want to automate updates have a look into cron-apt. testing/unstable users should certainly not be using gui apt tools anyway.

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I am on testing and that is right. I do open synaptic because it is there and it is a handy place to do casual browsing of available packages.

I have always preferred apt-get but am growing in my appreciation of some of the features of aptitude.

The "real" package managers supplied with Debian are just real hard to beat.

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I'm just glad that the issue I was experiencing didn't take days to resolve.The presence of that update was causing my machine to freeze.Now that everything was updated it's back to normal. The only problem that I have now is it freezes while watching hulu. But I think that problem is related to Intel915 garaphics & hulu itself.