I’m still a fairly new Linux-user (on Tuxedo OS), and I just ran into an issue that is new to me. If I try to update my system, either via command line or Discover, the apt update command fails. This is the output:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock. It is held by process 1635 (apt-get)
N: Be aware that removing the lock file is not a solution and may break your system.
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/

Process 1635 is apt-get update run by root, and persists through restart. I am tempted to try to kill it (kill 1635), but I’m not sure if anything could break from that, so I thought I’d try to ask for help first before I do something stupid.

EDIT:

I have managed to update my system by killing the process, which releases the lock, and then going on to do normal sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. For the sake of troubleshooting, I tried to add back my third-party repos one by one, and none of them caused any problem. However, when rebooting the same issue as described above happens again. Software updates is set to “Manually” in the System settings.

In addition, everytime I ran sudo apt upgrade, at the end some update related to initramfs fails. My disk is encrypted using cryptsetup, and as I’ve come to understand, I should be very careful doing anything related to initramfs when that is the case. Here is the output:

Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.140ubuntu13.2) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-6.2.0-10018-tuxedo
I: The initramfs will attempt to resume from /dev/dm-2
I: (/dev/mapper/system-swap)
I: Set the RESUME variable to override this.
zstd: error 25 : Write error : No space left on device (cannot write compressed block) 
E: mkinitramfs failure zstd -q -1 -T0 25
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-6.2.0-10018-tuxedo with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
 installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

EDIT 2:

The issue seems to have been narrowed down to a failure of Tuxedo’s driver configuration service that runs at boot. It is this process that calls apt-get (and something I should’ve seen earlier…), and systemctl status reveals some errors:

aug. 08 15:33:56 laptop systemd[1]: Starting Tomte-daemon, finishes tasks that could not be accomplished before...
aug. 08 15:34:06 laptop tuxedo-tomte[1393]: no network found!! some fixes might not be applied correctly
aug. 08 15:34:06 laptop tuxedo-tomte[1393]: systemctlCmd: systemd-run --on-active="30sec" tuxedo-tomte configure all >/dev/null 2>&1

I really appreciate the help from everyone so far. It’s a good experience asking for help here, and I’ve learned a lot from your answers. Makes being a Linux newbie a lot easier. So thank you :)

Since this seems to be a very specific issue related to Tuxedo’s own services, I will contact their support to get their input on what to do next.

  • @[email protected]OP
    6•1 year ago

    Yeah, it happens straight after boot, but it never resolves itself. And the process exists after reboot as well, so it seems that it starts running apt-get update and gets stuck / hangs.

    • Gellis12English
      5•1 year ago

      Definitely sounds like auto-update if it’s respawning itself on every boot. The fact that it never exits is weird though; have you added any third party repos? What’s in your apt sources.list file(s)?

      • @[email protected]OP
        1•1 year ago

        My sources.list file is pretty clean, with 3 https-sources for the Tuxedo OS mirror repos of the original Ubuntu ones. In the sources.list.d directory, there are some that have been added by me, such as for Signal, Librewolf and VS Codium. In total there are 11 files in here, each with one additional source. All except one is https, and the last one is mirror+file. In the process tree for apt-get, there are 13 subprocesses, while there are 14 sources in total (11+3). Could it be that it hangs on the last one here?

        EDIT: Would this be a viable way to troubleshoot? I backup the sources and just replace them with a blank sources.list file and an empty sources.list.d directory. If that works, I add the repos back one at the time and see which one that fails. Or could I run into unintended trouble if I remove the main repos, even for a short time? I would think that it just wouldn’t find anything and just be happy there are no updates.

        • Gellis12English
          2•1 year ago

          I’d leave the main sources.list alone, but temporarily move all of the files out of sources.list.d and see if that fixes it.

          • @[email protected]OP
            1•1 year ago

            As added as an edit in the original post, I managed to update my system by killing the process, did an upgrade with only the original sources.list and then added back the third-party repos one-by-one. None of the third party repos caused any problem when adding them back. Problem persists upon reboot. There seems to be an issue with updating initramfs at the end of every sudo apt upgrade, but that shouldn’t run on boot, so I don’t think that can be the cause?