[SOLVED] kpackagekit 'exclusive lock' error

[quarkslot]

I've just performed a clean install of 9.04 and was using KPackageKit to install additional software packages.

Perhaps unwisely I stacked up a load of software to install at once (this has worked for me previously using Synaptic) but for some reason it threw an error when installing sun-java6 so I de-selected sun-java6 and tried again but now it reports "Cannot get the exclusive lock on the packaging backend. Please close any other legacy packaging tools that may be open."

However I haven't used any other packaging tools on this installation so it seems that KPackageKit has managed to lock itself out when it hit the error. I tried a reboot but no change.

Does anyone know where the lock file is and how I can clear it?

KPackageKit is the new tool of choice in Kubuntu so I thought I'd give it a go!

Thanks.

[quarkslot]

Re: kpackagekit 'exclusive lock' error

Ok, I found a lock file in /var/lib/dpkg which I renamed to lock-old. However when I run KPackageKit it generates a new lock file and displays the message again, so there is more to it than just this file.

[quarkslot]

Re: kpackagekit 'exclusive lock' error

I decided to try Synaptic and see if that had the same issue but when I ran sudo apt-get install synaptic to install Synaptic it failed with a new message which provided the answer to my original problem:

E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.

When the sun-java6 error occurred some software packages had been downloaded but not installed, this left the installation in an unfinished state and it was this that KPackageKit was complaining about.

Running the sudo dpkg --configure -a completed the configuration of these packages, once done KPackageKit was good to go again.

[Guest]

Re: [SOLVED] kpackagekit 'exclusive lock' error

Had the same problem and performed the same steps and it worked fine.

[Frankaz]

Re: [SOLVED] kpackagekit 'exclusive lock' error

KPackageKit has some known bugs:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/KubuntuJauntyPackageManager
So far that means things like Sun Java, Virtualbox & Adobe Reader won't install correctly using KpackageKit - best to use GDebi & Synaptic until it's fixed.

[amigabill]

Re: [SOLVED] kpackagekit 'exclusive lock' error

I had a similar problem after trying to update my VirtualBox machine. There were 50 updates to apply, and the laptop kept just powering off very suddenly. I guess at some point something got unhappoy about that and the KpackageKit was unable to lock anymore.

I removed the lock file as suggested above, I tried sudo dpkg --configure -a but that gave an error about expecting a : in some field of something, which I didn't understand. I ended up deleting everything under /var/lib/dpkg/updates/ as well as removing lock file, and that got me updating again and now I'm good. Perhaps an update file in that dir got mangled with power suddenly went away...

My Vbox is runing on top of Windows XP host. I believe it ay have been an overheating thing, as the laptop fan had been wizzing pretty hard for a while during the 50 update attempt. By the time I got fighting with the lock file it had gone down to 9 updates to do so that must have been a small enough number to get finished before overheating, though I'm not sure why that would be allowed to happen anyway. Odd though that I tried the 50 updates a few times before the number dropped to 9, why didn't it drop any at all the first few times through? Weird.