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
    0·
    2 years ago

    Ok, so now I have managed to update my system by killing the process, which releases the lock, and then going on to do normal sudo apt updateand sudo apt upgrade. For the sake of troubleshooting, I tried to add back my third-party repos one by one, and none of them caused any problem.

    However, when rebooting, the same problem happens again. In system settings, auto update was already set to “Manually” and offline updates is unchecked. I have not made any modifications to this. I did not have software-properties-kde installed, and it was also not available by running sudo apt install software-properties-kde. It suggested only software-properties-qt instead. So I could not check those settings, but in the 20auto-upgrades file, Update-Package-Lists and Unattended-Upgrades are the only lines present, and both are set to 1.

    In addition, everytime I ran sudo apt upgrade, at the end some update related to initramfs fails. My disk is encrypted using cryptsetup, and as I’ve come to understand, I should be very careful doing anything related to initramfs when that is the case. Here is the output:

    Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.140ubuntu13.2) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-6.2.0-10018-tuxedo
I: The initramfs will attempt to resume from /dev/dm-2
I: (/dev/mapper/system-swap)
I: Set the RESUME variable to override this.
zstd: error 25 : Write error : No space left on device (cannot write compressed block) 
E: mkinitramfs failure zstd -q -1 -T0 25
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-6.2.0-10018-tuxedo with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
 installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

    Since this is buried quite a long way down into a thread, I will now also update the main post to include this update.

    • Gellis12@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      zstd: error 25 : Write error : No space left on device (cannot write compressed block)

      What’s the output of df -H?

      Also, this sounds like it’s installing initramfs, which is normally only done when first installing the OS; can we get a list of the packages it’s trying to install/upgrade?

      • cyberwolfie@lemmy.mlOP
        1·
        2 years ago

        This shows up when running sudo apt update after having killed the process that is holding the lock. Where would I find out which packages it is trying to install or upgrade? It does say update-initramfs in the second line there, so I think it’s trying to update?

        Relevant output from df -H:

        /dev/nvme0n1p1           1,1G  945M   24M  98% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p2           536M  9,3M  527M   2% /boot/efi
        • Gellis12@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Ok, there’s the problem. Your boot partition is pretty much full. You’re using partitions instead of lvm, so expanding the partition will be next to impossible; so start looking through /boot for stuff that’s safe to delete. It’s weird that you have so much stuff in there, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my boot partition go above 250mb used.