Hi can anybody help me with this. I've just installed a PPA and now
need to update cache but when I do so it says there is another
synaptic running in interactive mode. Please close it first.

How to fix please

Close Synaptic and any other applications that deal with software updates, then try again.

If you still experience the problem, you can either kill the relevant tasks or, more simply, reboot.

Have tried rebooting but can't seem to find anything related to synaptic in tasks list

Now that you've rebooted, are you still experiencing the problem?

Yes

Ok. Close Synaptic and run the following from the command line:

sudo apt-get update

If there any errors, paste them here. If not, proceed to:

sudo apt-get upgrade

and paste the output here.

1 members found this post helpful.

Nice one hydrurga thats done it

Thanks. And the output from sudo apt-get upgrade?

Ok, all looks good. Best that you reboot now, due to the grub and dbus updates, and then try Synaptic again.

Why did you edit your posts like that, actinide? Not only was I unaware that you had done so (you don't get notified for edits on LQ, just for new posts), but by deleting the output from the commands you rendered the thread pretty useless for anyone else reading it in the future.

My advice: don't do editing like that again to remove your output: remember that you're part of a community here. I wasn't just helping you but helping anyone else with a similar problem.

My additional advice: please mark this thread as solved.

For everyone else, I worked out what I think caused this problem in the first place. When you click on Settings->Repositories in Synaptic Package Manager, there is a new window opened. Although it looks as if this part of Synaptic, it is actually software-sources, which you can run directly and independently of Synaptic if you so desire.

Now, the APT package management suite, used by both Synaptic and software-sources, only allows access by one program at a time, enforced by activating a lock in the relevant apt directory. So, if you access software-sources through Synaptic, and then try to refresh the cache in the software-sources window, software-sources can't actually do it because Synaptic has locked APT.

The solution? Either run software-sources directly or, once you have finished running software-sources through Synaptic, close that window and do the cache refresh (reload) from Synaptic itself.

2 members found this post helpful.