Software Manager greying out

[chewhundred]

Version: 14
Architecture: AMD64
Enviroment: MATE

Upon attempting to install anything (by double clicking the desired package), the software manager greys out with the linux equivalent of the hourglass in the foreground. It does this for every single package.



Synaptic also fails, the following message it displayed when opening: "



Thanks

[flyboy1565]

You might try going in to the terminal and sudo apt-get update

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[viking777]

In a file manager look at the location /etc/apt. If it has files and folders in it, but is just missing the folder preferences.d you can simply create the folder (it is an empty folder anyway - on my computer). If /etc/apt is completely empty then the problem is not quite so trivial as it first looks.

[chewhundred]

You might try going in to the terminal and sudo apt-get update

Sent from my ADR6350 using Tapatalk 2

get 'command not found'

In a file manager look at the location /etc/apt. If it has files and folders in it, but is just missing the folder preferences.d you can simply create the folder (it is an empty folder anyway - on my computer). If /etc/apt is completely empty then the problem is not quite so trivial as it first looks.

after creating the folder, it still greys out

thanks for responses. any other ideas anyone?

[viking777]

Post the output of

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ls /etc/apt

[chewhundred]

Post the output of

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ls /etc/apt

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apt.conf.d   preferences.d  sources.list.d  trusted.gpg
preferences  sources.list   trustdb.gpg     trusted.gpg~

[viking777]

I don't see anything special there. Can you try this instead:

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whereis apt-get

Your response to Flyboy1565's command is puzzling.

[chewhundred]

I don't see anything special there. Can you try this instead:

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whereis apt-get

Your response to Flyboy1565's command is puzzling.

hmm strange, this is all that's outputted:

$ whereis apt-get
apt-get:

[viking777]

That means it is not installed. Which is serious. It means you have either accidentally removed it - which is a big mistake - or it was never there in the first place which means your installation has failed. In both cases the likelihood is that you will have to reinstall but before you do that I have one other thing for you to try.

Run the command

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whereis aptitude

If you get results similar to apt-get then there is no need to proceed further - reinstall. (and download the iso again first - and check the md5 sum) However if it gives you something like this:

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aptitude: /usr/bin/aptitude /usr/bin/X11/aptitude /usr/share/aptitude /usr/share/man/man8/aptitude.8.gz


Which is what it should do, then try this command:

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sudo aptitude install apt

This will reinstall apt-get for you (along with any dependencies it needs that you are missing) and your software manager should then work.

Edit. There is another more manual way to do this using dpkg (if you have got dpkg that is ?) but it is extremely long winded as you have to manually install each dependency for apt. If you want to try it let me know.

[chewhundred]

Thanks. I ended up having to reinstall which has done the treat.