Linux Mint Forums

In mint 9, I was getting this "WARNING you are about to install software that can't be authenticated! Doing this could allow a malicious individual to damage or take control of your system." with every package I tried to install using synaptic. Thankfully, vincent told me that the problem was a line:
APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated 1;
in the /etc/apt/apt.conf file, and he told me how to fix it. Now, using mint 10, I'm getting this same error message with every package I try to install. BUT there isn't any /etc/apt/apt.conf file in mint 10. So what do I do???? Incidentally, at first synaptic worked properly in mint 10, but now it doesn't. I have no idea what happened to change this.

(the problem I had in mint 9 was solved in this forum)
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=55462


Thanks to anyone who has a solution.

So as not to start confusions, I'm a different Vincent

Did you clean install Linux Mint 10, or did you upgrade from 9 to 10? I would suggest you do a clean install if you didn't already do this, as this error is not normal.

If you did do a clean install, did you add PPAs or edit the sources.list? What repositories have you added?

Clean install, but then I restored data, settings, etc. from old computer (using mint backup tool). I didn't have this problem at that time. I did add a PPA, (details at this post:)
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=72841

and it messed everything up. But after I got things running again, I did a ppa-purge. Also dist-upgrade. I'm certain, though, that I installed some programs since then, and didn't have this error message come up. I did install 2 programs from .deb files: the latest versions of skype (to see if sound problems were fixed), and the latest Anki (again, to fix some problems in the repository version).

If mint 10 has the equivalent of the APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated (must be set to 0 or everything is treated as unauthenticated) variable, I'm guessing that it somehow got set to 1 and I need to reset it, but where to find it???

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Autom ... ityUpdates
--looks like you might need a different place for the rules file

• /etc/apt/apt.conf.d

This is for Ubuntu 10, but even if Mint 10x didn't provide an apt.conf file, you could create one, and it is likely to be accepted as apt's configuration file or to make sure search your hard drive for that file name --and if it is there, you will find it
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/luc ... onf.5.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Packaging_Tool

Waded through those links and figured out that there is no longer an apt.conf file, but an apt.conf.d folder that contains fragments. Just added the APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated 0; line to one of the files in that folder, and now synaptic seems to be working fine. Don't know what messed it up in the first place, since it's been fine the whole time (close to a year?) that I've been using Mint10. Thanks for the help.