apt synaptic problems

ok, so i installed apt and synaptic on my machine running fedora 1. afterwards i begin downloading and installing a few things like k3b, mplayer, and totem. everything is great, and installs flawlessly. so i decide to upgrade some of the stuff i already have on my machine like gaim, an ftp client(already forgot which one) and two or three others. anyway, i start the install and my system freezes for about an hour. i get tired of waiting and decide that its time to end the process. now the whole system is pretty much locked. i decide to reboot and everything seems to be cool when the system starts. well, things are not cool. afterwards i tried to install those packages again and got the following message:

Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. Unable to lock the download directory.


i have tried googling this error and couldnt find any useful information. i also tried putting the error message into the search function of a few linux forums and still i came up short. any idea on how to fix this? i really would like to get a few more neat packages. any help would be great. thank you.

Have you tried to do
# apt-get --fix-broken

You can also select that option from the menu
Actions/Fix broken packages

Don't know if this is gonna help because I've seen lots of threads about apt-unable to lock the download directory and most of them seem to involve NFS, not broken packages.

yeah, i tried that. i also tried rpm -vv --rebuilddb, as well as apt-get -f install and apt-get -f remove.

Hi all!

I am having difficulties with apt/synaptic too. I used apt-get to download/install synaptic, but when I click on the Synaptic Package Manager from the KDE application list, Synaptic Package Manager will not start. It looks like it is launching, then quits.

Anyone have any ideas why this may be happening, or how I might fix it?

Please let me know when you get a chance.

Thanks for your time and consideration!

sax

yeah, i tried that. i also tried rpm -vv --rebuilddb, as well as apt-get -f install and apt-get -f remove.

Sorry m8 but I have no clue where to go next from here, maybe one of the gurus from here will ...

It looks like it is launching, then quits. Anyone have any ideas why this may be happening, or how I might fix it?

Whenever something loike that happens, try to start the program from a terminal window, 99% of the time an error output is gonna be generated if there's a problem.

That might give you a clue to what's happening and if not it will probably mean something for someone else on these forums.

yeah, i tried that. i also tried rpm -vv --rebuilddb, as well as apt-get -f install and apt-get -f remove.

Actually, now that I think of it, I did have an error similar to yours after upgrading from KDE 3.1.4 to 3.2.
Synaptic froze during the installation stage and I had to kill it after which it started to complain about missing widgets and not being able to lock the donwload directory and simply refused to start up.

I ran apt-get from a terminal, did
# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade
and after that everything was ok again.

Also make sure that Synaptic's not running when you issue rpm commands from a terminal window.

Originally posted by saxophobe Hi all! I am having difficulties with apt/synaptic too. I used apt-get to download/install synaptic, but when I click on the Synaptic Package Manager from the KDE application list, Synaptic Package Manager will not start. It looks like it is launching, then quits. Anyone have any ideas why this may be happening, or how I might fix it? Please let me know when you get a chance. Thanks for your time and consideration! sax

hi,
the problem is not kde, not synaptic ... problem is gksu that runs synaptic as super user, but sth broken in gksu, simply change the executing command "gksu -u root /usr/sbin/synaptic" to "kdesu -u root /usr/sbin/synaptic" from kmenuedit > system > Synaptic
HTH