Software update false alarm

[shadroth]

Hi all,

I have Kubuntu 13.04 installed on a Dell Inspiron laptop and it generally works great. After using it for a week, I started to experience a curious bug. Now everytime I login I receive a system notification that "A software update is available". Every. Single. Time. This is almost always a false alarm and everything is up-to-date so clearly something screwy is going on. The false notification also occurs if I run "sudo apt-get update" at the command line. Any ideas what might be causing this?

Thanks!

Stephen

[Rog132]

Earlier: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...-notifications

After you run the "sudo apt-get update". What are telling commands ?

ls -l /var/lib/update-notifier/updates-available

and

/usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check --human-readable

[whatthefunk]

Ive had this happen a few times too. No idea why.

[shadroth]

Earlier: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...-notifications

After you run the "sudo apt-get update". What are telling commands ?

ls -l /var/lib/update-notifier/updates-available

and

/usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check --human-readable

> ls -l /var/lib/update-notifier/updates-available

results in:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1 Sep 18 10:29 /var/lib/update-notifier/updates-available

> /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check --human-readable

results in:

1 package can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

However, whatever that 1 package is, apt-get cannot find it:

> sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

So it seems like there's 1 package in limbo which keeps triggering the system notification for available upgrades, but I can't figure out how to access and/or upgrade it.

[Rog132]

and if you run the /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check with the p option ?

:~$ /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check -help
Usage: apt-check [options]

Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-p, --package-names Show the packages that are going to be
installed/upgraded
--human-readable Show human readable output on stdout
--security-updates-unattended
Return the time in days when security updates are
installed unattended (0 means disabled)

[tek_heretik]

I turn off update notifications and do them manually about once a week.

[shadroth]

and if you run the /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check with the p option ?

> /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check -p --human-readable
sysvutils

I then tried to upgrade that particular package:

> sudo apt-get install sysvutils

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
sysvutils
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 68.6 kB of archives.
After this operation, 180 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates/main sysvutils i386 2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu45.1 [68.6 kB]
Fetched 68.6 kB in 1s (38.6 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package sysvutils.
(Reading database ... 203576 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sysvutils (from .../sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu45.1_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu45.1_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit-utils 2.88dsf-13.10ubuntu15
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu45.1_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Ironically, this also resulted in yet another system notification that a software update is available. Ugh!

[shadroth]

Okay, I think I may have answered my own question here. As you would have seen from my previous response, the package in question was being sourced from http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu. I had added that manually to the list of debian sources in order to install g77 on my system. I removed that from the list of sources and re-ran the ap-get update and now the sysvutils package has disappeared from the list of required updates. I'm guessing that has fixed the problem in a work-around kind of way. I presume removing that source from the list won't affect my g77 installation?

[SteveRiley]

I'd say the problem was more related to the distribution specified:

Get:1 http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ [B]hardy-updates[/B]/main sysvutils i386 2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu45.1 [68.6 kB]

Pretty old! What you did to fix the problem is not a "workaround"; instead, it was the right thing. You shouldn't be installing packages from a Hardy repository on Raring, that's fer sher.

Can you tell us more about what "g77" is and why installing something from a Hardy repository was recommended?