Hello all -- I am making a complete transition to Linux after deciding that I really hate Windows. To that end, I have been using Ubuntu. I started out with Natty and moved to Oneiric a few days ago. I am experiencing an issue in Oneiric that I did not ever experience in Natty.

It happens when I try to have more than one sudo command running at once -- anything at all that requires sudo, NOT just installing or downloading packages. I get the pair of error messages that says:

So I am only able to have one sudoed command running at once. To run another one, no matter what it is, I have to kill the other. This issue is NOT associated with frozen processes. Now, I know this never happened to me in Natty, and it is noticeably a pain in the neck in Oneiric. I need to be able to run more than one sudoed command at a time.

Does anyone know why this is happening and how I can fix it?

I assume you mean running a root command in two separate terminal sessions simultaneously. The error indicates that both commands want to use the package system. If so, do one thing at once. If not, perhaps you have a stale lock or a process running in the background accessing the package system (such as an automatic system checking for updates).

You could use lsof to see if another process is accessing /var/lib/dpkg/lock.

I'll leave the details of Unbuntu's package system to other Ubuntu users who can better help in that area than I can. My version of this problem in KDE is when "kpackagekitsmarticon" has a lock on the rpm database and I can't use zypper.