Newbie needs help with mintUpdate.

[ctothebizza]

Hey everyone! I'm a complete newbie who got fed up with windows and thought I'd give this a shot. After a clean install, I can't get mintUpdate to do any updating. Here is what happened:

I just freshly installed Linux Mint, and after it booted up, I noticed that the icon in the toolbar says that there are 49 updates to install. When I click on it, mintUpdate hangs. Finally, after about 15 minutes, I got to the screen with the heading "Keep your system up-to-date." It showed no updates, so I clicked on refresh, and the window grayed out, and I watched the cursor spin for another 25 minutes, and nothing happens. Does this mean that everything is up to date? I really appreciate any help you can give me. Thanks in advance, and sorry if this is a dumb question.

[McLovin]

Its not dumb, it's actually kind of puzzling, cause if you did a fresh install, there should be quite a few updates. What are you system specs, and when you burned the ISO, did you use the lowest speed? also, can you connect to the internet? This could be a few different things, so we need as much info as you can provide.

[ctothebizza]

Thanks for the quick response! I burned the iso 4-5 days ago on the lowest possible speed. I have an MSI K9NGM4-F V.2 motherboard and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ with 2 gigs of RAM. Also, I thought I'd mention that to get the LiveCD to boot, I had to take out my wireless card, and run in graphic safe mode. I don't know if that is relevant, but other than that, the installation and everything with smoothly. If there is anything else you need to know to help, just let me know! Thanks!!

[ctothebizza]

Oh, I forgot to add, I am able to connect to the internet as well.

[Gman8941]

hmmm.....seems kinda odd. have you tried it lately? does it give you any errors at all? also does everything else seem to be running well?

[900i]

I get the same problem and have to disable the Medibuntu repo in the sources list as it is always locking up mintupdate. To check open a terminal and do a "sudo apt-get update". If it gets to the last line and gets stuck, just make a note of which repo you are having problems with and comment it out of your sources.list. Also it can stop mintinstall from working in the software portal.

[ctothebizza]

I ran "sudo apt-get update" and this is what it showed me:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11 Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the list directory

I also noticed that the software portal does not work either. Same sort of situation, just locks up on "backing up your APT sources."

[900i]

I ran "sudo apt-get update" and this is what it showed me:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11 Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the list directory

I also noticed that the software portal does not work either. Same sort of situation, just locks up on "backing up your APT sources."

Press ALT+F2, then type "gksu nautilus" and enter your password. BE CAREFUL as you are now running nautilus as root. Navigate to /var/lib/apt/lists in the file system and find the file called "lock" and delete it. Shut down root nautilus and do another "sudo apt-get update" in a terminal and all should be OK, but remember when you are root in nautilus you can seriously screw your system if you don't know what you are doing.

[bth73]

I had this same problem. Go to synaptic package manager and click on "mark all updates" and apply, that should get all the updates then Mint update will work