Fixing Adept Manager/sources.list

[Steve_S.]

Hi, All,
I have a question that I think is based around the sources. list. A lattle background: My ex- wife told me she was tired of Windows, and asked for a suggestion toward Linux. I burned and sent her several live distros, and she chose Kubuntu 6.06 and installed it. So far, so good.
She asked me for help getting software. I emailed her a copy of my sources.list, and explained to her how to back up her origional sources.list, then how to copy, paste, and save the new one. I then took through adding the multibuntu repository and pgp key in a terminal. everything worked ok, up until she tried to get the pgp key; terminal kept telling her that it was a bad command.
I had her try apt-get update. It didn't work. I had her try to open Adept Manager, thinking she could fetch updates from there. Adept errored out, stating problems with sources.list. I had her try to restore her backed up sources.list, and the system won't let her do that, either. How do I tell her to fix this? I hope it can be fixed without a re-install; she's done alot of other work already. Evidently, I'm not a very good teacher,especially when trying to do it over the phone. Unfortunately, I can't go to her house to work with this, as she lives in Texas, and I live in North Carolina.

Thanks in advance,

Steve

[dibl]

Re: Fixing Adept Manager/sources.list

I don't seem to have the problems with Adept Manager that others report, but maybe Synaptic would be a little more rugged for her.

sudo apt-get install synaptic

Of course, it will need to be exercised with "refresh" before it is reading the sources.list file.

I'm wondering what was wrong with the original sources as provided in the 6.06 installation? It doesn't seem like it should have been necessary to replace them -- maybe there was something else going on, that wasn't fixed by your e-mailed sources file.

Personally, I found Feisty and Gutsy considerably more usable on my (newish) hardware. 6.06 and 6.10 didn't recognize my webcam or my USB memory stick. 7.04 and 7.10 have been much kinder, in that regard.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

[Steve_S.]

Re: Fixing Adept Manager/sources.list

I haven't had many problems with 6.06; I built my conputer around 2001, but I upgrade constantly. I sent her a copy of my sources.list (I have 6.06 also, so theoretically, she should be able to use my list) because I thought it would be easier on her to copy and paste mine into her system than to add the new repository lines manually through adept manager. Remember, this is her first exposure to Linux. Maybe I was wrong. I think we need to deal with the sources.list file first, then think about something like synaptic; apt-get does not seem to be working, either, because of the sources problem.

Thanks,

Steve

[Steve_S.]

Re: Fixing Adept Manager/sources.list

Ok, this one is fixed! It was actually simpler than I thought. Since she and I both have the exact same install, I emailed her a copy of my sources.list, and had her save it in her /home/ folder. I then had her open konsole and run:

sudo cp -f /home/(the name of your home folder)/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list

This replaced the borked file with the good one. I then had her run:

sudo wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

to install the pgp key for the multibuntu repository, which was on the new sources.list. After that, I had her run:

sudo apt-get update

to make sure everything was current. When she opened Adept Manager, everything was happy, and a new user has 18,997 packages to oggle. The answer turned out to be very simple! I hope this helps anyone else that runs across this problem.

Steve