qx1

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I was trying to get Beryl, It called for some modification of the Sources.list. Now, whenever I attempt to use synaptics I get this error message:'Failed to check for installed and available applications'. Then the error message goes on to berate me (maybe I deserve it) *This is a major failure of your software management system Check the file permissions and correctness of /etc/apt/sources.list*

In my mind, the worse case scenario would be reinstalling the whole shebang- unless there's away to repair this.

MY first thought was to try reinstalling the original sources list from my 'Ubuntu distro CD'. The cd even gave me a prompt asking if I'd like to update/ upgrade my sources.list.

then when I click the appropriate button it craps out on me and tells me that the update failed.

If anyone has any ideas I'd really like to hear them... And this is one Newbie mistake I'll not make again. I'll be adding repositories throught synaptics or not doing it at all.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

cpd05

Hold on a minute there buddy,

Editing the Source.list file is, I find, the easiest way to add/remove repositories, you've probably made a minor syntax error, post the contents of your sources.list file

Chris

lefty.crupps

yes, Synaptics is pretty and all but not nearly as fun for adding in sources, and it does the same thing as a manual edit...

qx1

Thanks guys, but last night I just went ahead and reinstalled it. Thankfully most of my info is on a usb drive... So it wasn't a major problem.


But I'm wondering how could I have fixed it? Is there an internet tutorial somewhere that can teach me some finer points of the terminal etc.

Any info you can give me will be greatly appreciated


qx11984@yahoo.com

P.S. Is this thing something like the windows registry? Like maybe instead of the programs being in the registry your sources for the programs are in your registry? Or do the Linux programs themselves have a seperate registry?

New2Linux2

I'm not sure if this applies to synaptics, but apt and all apt-based packet management tools require you to edit the sources.list using apt-setup. Before I found that out (the hard way, of course) I had added a couple sources to sources.list using vi and received some very nasty berating from aptitude the next time I ran it. Check the man page or info pages for synaptics to make sure.

cpd05

Hey,

The sources.list file is just a list of the servers that apt will attempt to connect to, too download packages from. It follows some specific formatting rules, see here for more details

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ap...s-sources.list

If you want to know more about the terminal, well pretty much anything actually, just open a terminal and enter:

man bash

or

info bash

Also try:

man man
info info

They'll tell you all about what they are and how you can use them etc.

The equivalent windows app would be the new windows powershell.

Chris.