Linux Mint Forums

Hi taniwha,
Can you tell us what you mean by: "does not work"?
Is the icon showing in the task area of the gnome panel?
Have you launched it from MintMenu -->Administration-->mintUpdate?
Did it ever work?
HAve you restarted X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace?

Thanks.

I see there are others that have had a problem as well. http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... 47&t=10860
From the User Manual:
"Note: If you get errors with MintUpdate (“Can’t refresh list of packages” for instance) you can check the logs for MintUpdate. Open a terminal and “cd /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintUpdate/logs” then “ls –lrt” and look at the last file appearing in the list with the command “more filename”. Most of the time, it’s to do with a problem with your /etc/apt/sources.list or your network settings. Don’t hesitate to ask on the forums if there is a problem you can’t resolve."
You have done the last thing and asked for help. I don't know that I can help, but I did have what sounds like a similar problem or same when a couple of the repositories in sources list were not well. I commented them out and ran update and things worked. As I recall I later found that I had broken packages, ran fix broken packages in synaptic, edited menu.list (un-commented the repo's I had commented out) and update was happy again.
The interesting thing is that you get the lock error. Open terminal and enter: Then try mintUpdate.

Are you using the KDE edition? I have had some issues with kubuntu after an update with APT being locked all the time.
Anyway, make sure you don't have any APT's running (synaptic/apt-get/aptitude/Adept etc) and try again. If this does not work, use the command newW suggested: In most cases that will fix the lock issue.

Yes another application is using APT - the log indicates that:
"another application is using APT"
And that is why you cannot get a lock. I'll raise up to Clem and Husse.

The command after is ls -lrt
Now this does not matter I think as we've established that something is using apt
Open a terminal and give the command top
Study the output and see if something is running that is indeed connected to apt
Unfortunately the search is not working too well so I don't find other posts with the problem
"another application is using APT", but I know they exist
Try and/or

@ arv
Your problem may be found and solved here
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... e_programs

If you have problems with lock files make sure to close all applications based on APT (synaptic, adept, mintUpdate, apt-get..etc). Eventually if the problem persists, simply delete the lock file in question (with sudo rm).

Clem.