I tried to install some software this morning on my newly installed Kubuntu system (latest stable release) but the installer froze during the installation part and I am not able to log-in anymore. Whenever I try to use the program it tells me I won't be able to change any settings or add/remove any software because there is another instance of the package already running. How can I find and terminate this other instance?

I have tried changing the settings to close the session each time I log out but it made no difference. Also, the system hangs whenever I turn the computer off, is this related?

Thanks in advance.

A.

System hanging at shutdown could be a problem linked to acpi option passed to the kernel ...

To find a process running, just run in command line
ps -ef | grep name_of_the_process (maybe apt or so)

This command gives you the PID of the process ... So you kan kill it :
kill PID (or kill -9 PID if it's really stuck)

Thanks for your help but I use kill to remove the jobs from the process list and then try to load the program but it still doesn't work. I remove all entries for both apt and adept from my list (user and root) but it still doesn't work. Any ideas?

Maybe it writes a lock file somewhere, but as I'm quite new to Ubuntu I can't tell ... Hope you can find someone more knowledgeable for the apt stuff ...

Did you figure out something for the system freeze at shutdown ? I really think it's unrelated ...

Thanks for helping as much as you did. I will re-install the ACPI software once I can use apt/adept again.

Maybe acpi is OK, but the arguments passed to the kernel are not right ... You may want to try to edit /etc/grub/menu.lst (or other grub config file) and add "acpi=ht" (without quotes) in kernel argument part ...

I fixed the problem with adept I reinstalled the system so had to start again but at least it worked afterwards

How can I revert package selections so adept will no longer try to install them? I found some DNS anonymiser packages after I aded some extra repositories but when I selected some of them to install I was told of a break in the package selection and the program decided to not let me unselect them (even though they are not selected on the menu now) which means i am unable to install anything else and I need to install Java for one of the packages (http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html). Any idea's?

Thanks in advance.