I’m still a fairly new Linux-user (on Tuxedo OS), and I just ran into an issue that is new to me. If I try to update my system, either via command line or Discover, the apt update command fails. This is the output:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock. It is held by process 1635 (apt-get)
N: Be aware that removing the lock file is not a solution and may break your system.
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/

Process 1635 is apt-get update run by root, and persists through restart. I am tempted to try to kill it (kill 1635), but I’m not sure if anything could break from that, so I thought I’d try to ask for help first before I do something stupid.

  • cyberwolfie@lemmy.mlOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    As far as I can tell, these are the methods apt uses to get information from the repositories that is listed within sources.list and within the sources.list.d directory. The number of subprocesses almost matches the number of sources there - in reality there are 14 listed, not 13 as is seen in the ps output. I can find one entry that starts with mirror+file, but otherwise there are 13 https entries. So that last line I am not sure what is doing.

    Anyways, it seems to me that it gets stuck somewhere updating the repositories list. Right now, I’m stuck with three questions:

    1. I’m still unsure as to whether it would be safe to kill the process, as I could imagine that having a corrupted depencies files could be really bad?
    2. Also, would killing the process automatically release the lock, or would I need to remove that myself after?
    3. Is there any reason to believe that this would even work, seeing as this happens everytime on boot. I imagine that if I kill the process, delete the lock and try to run sudo apt update I just end up the same place again.
    • toasteecup@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      So my theory on what’s going on is this.

      I suspect that this is an automatically running update to try to help keep your packages up to date, and I think it’s getting stuck on a source configured in your /etc/apt/sources.list I’m willing to bet it’s likely a source configured to pull from a “CD” which is used during installation and they forgot to disable that one.

      You should be able to stop it, it’ll still be locked but you’ll need find the lock file (I forgot where it’s configured) and just remove it with a simple rm, you’ll probably need to sudo the rm though.

      So my order of operations would be, kill the process, try to rerun the apt update and see if that tells you which repo it’s getting stuck on.