problems with adept after upgrading

[Peter Lewis]

Hi,

On Tuesday 16 October 2007 at 22:26:33 joseph lockhart wrote:
> my specific problem currently is with the
> adept_manager (the add and remove program section
> works just fine) which when i log in gives me the
> following message:
>
> "Another process is using the packaging system
> database (probably some other Adept application or
> apt-get or aptitude).
> Would you like to attempt to resolve this problem? No
> will enter read-only mode and Cancel to quit and
> resolve this issue yourself."

I had this problem yesterday and managed to fix it somehow.... let's see if I 
can remember how ;-)

The problem came from the fact that a package had begun to be installed, but 
then it "owned" a file which was already on the system as part of another 
package. In my case it was some kde4 stuff, which I'd been playing around 
with.

If your problem is actually the same as mine, then the following might help.

If you run:

sudo apt-get update

from the command line, it will try to install something and then give some 
errors and bail out. If it gives you the error message about two packages 
both owning the same file (sorry I can't remember the exact message, and 
obviously can't reproduce it any more), then it gives you the option to try 
to fix it with:

sudo apt-get -f install

This did some stuff for me, but then it bailed again. In the end, I 
uninstalled the offending packages (they weren't critical, luckily, though 
there were quite a few of them), did the upgrade and then reinstalled them.

It seems that the error that adept gives you isn't quite accurate - there 
isn't necessarily another apt process hanging around, it's just that the 
previous one didn't finish cleanly.

Good luck!

HTH.

Pete.