[SOLVED] Update Manage does not seem to work

Liamdale · 04-05-2018, 10:01 AM

Installed distro: Mint KDE 18.2 64 bit.

These last weeks the Update manager has a red X on the icon situated in the system tray. When I try to refresh the Update manager I get the message

Quote:

Could not refresh list of updates

I have tried the apt-get upgrade from the terminal which also does not seem to work. I get

Quote:

$ sudo apt-get upgrade
[sudo] password for xxxxxxx:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
adobe-flashplugin apparmor apt apt-transport-https apt-utils apt-xapian-index archdetect-deb avahi-autoipd avahi-daemon avahi-utils bluedevil breeze breeze-cursor-theme bsdutils
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra cpp-5 cups cups-bsd cups-client cups-common cups-core-drivers cups-daemon cups-ppdc cups-server-common curl dpkg dpkg-dev firefox firefox-locale-en fonts-opensymbol
friendly-recovery fwupd g++-5 gcc-5 gcc-5-base gtk3-engines-breeze hdparm icu-devtools initramfs-tools initramfs-tools-bin initramfs-tools-core isc-dhcp-client isc-dhcp-common kactivitymanagerd
...
...
python-twisted-names python-twisted-web python3-apt python3-crypto python3-uno qml-module-qtquick-controls-styles-breeze resolvconf samba-common samba-libs sddm-theme-breeze sensible-utils
smbclient systemd systemd-sysv systemsettings thunderbird thunderbird-locale-en thunderbird-locale-fr udev uno-libs3 ure user-manager util-linux uuid-runtime virtualbox-guest-dkms
virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11 xdg-user-dirs
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 270 not upgraded.

How can the update process be corrected?

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The problem has been solved.
The upgrade terminal command downloaded the package upgrade but refused to install them.
After questioning, it was suggested that the packages had a hold on them
the command: apt-mark showhold - showed that 2857 packages had a hold
A user suggested that removing these holds would possibly solve the problem

the suggestion.

Using the terminal command :

Write the list of packages, which are on "hold" state to a file.
apt-mark showhold > onhold

With root permissions tell apt-mark to unhold them
sudo apt-mark unhold `cat onhold`
Note! cat onhold is enclosed in single back quotes.

Verify no more packages are on "hold".
apt-mark showhold

The solution worked. I then open the Update Manager and clicked on the refresh button. The update Manager download it's own update.
I installed the update and the problem was solved. The Red X was removed from the Update manager's icon.

frankbell · 04-05-2018, 09:10 PM

This article should help: https://askubuntu.com/questions/601/...-do-i-solve-it

The short version is that updates are "held back" if their dependencies have changed and said dependencies have not be updated yet on localhost. It doesn't mean that the update process is broken.

You could try this:

Code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

It always worked for me, but you may want to back up crucial files just to be careful.