Another Packager Manager Is Running

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 02:13 -0700, Shawn Christopher wrote:
> Once again I apologize for the mail and I know someone will be able to
> answer this in about 30seconds however I am using Hoary and whenever I
> attempt to use the Ubuntu Update Manager or the Synaptic Update Manager
> I get an error message such as this when trying the UUM
> 
> Another Package Manager is Running
> 
> You can run only one package management application at the same time.
> Please close this other application first.
> 
> and when trying to use the Synaptic Update Manager I get:
> 
> Unable to get exclusive lock
> 
> This usually means that another package management application (like
> apt-get or aptitude) already running. Please close that application
> first.
> 
> Now I have opened up a root terminal and tried using killall apt-get and
> killall aptitude however that didn't seem to fix it. I also restarted
> into recovery mode and then when it got to ask for root password to run
> maintenance I logged in and did a apt-get dist-upgrade hoping that would
> fix it however it didn't. Any ideas?
> 
> Shawn
> 
> 

Hi Shawn...

Did you check for dselect and synaptic?  apt-get, aptitude, synaptic,
and dselect all control the Debian Packaging System.  Anyway, to make
sure no other packaging system running just reboot the system.

If the problem still exist, it's because the lock file is still exist
(because of a previously abnormal terminated process maybe?).  Delete it
and you should be okay (the lock file is: /var/lib/dpkg/lock).

WARNING:
        It's very important that you do *NOT* delete the lock file while
        the process that created it is still running.  Just as I said
        above, reboot your system to be safe.  A corrupted "available"
        file (created and maintained by the Debian Packaging System) is
        not something funny.

If this didn't help you, just tell us.
Ziyad.