[jakear]

Those darned apt locks have to be the second biggest PITA of my Linux development experience. Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea for an automatic system maintenance process to entirely block the user from doing their using for the first couple minutes after startup? As if that wasn’t enough they have the nerve to log this line:

> Be aware that removing the lock file is not a solution and may break your system.

Guess what? My system is already broken! It’s refusing to do what I want it to do (install a package so that I can test it) in favor of doing what some remote agent (the update service) told it to do.

At this point I just immediately delete the .lock file when I see that message. Never has given me any problems. If it did, I’d just reimage the VM and probably be done sooner than if I had waited for that lock.

[imglorp]

You can disable automatic updates and instead run them when you want.

[jakear]

Funny thing is I click “not now” or whatever it is when they pop up asking if I want updates, yet it still gets locked.

[imglorp]

If this is an Ubuntu flavor, you can run the "software and updates" program and set "Updates -> Automatically check for updates" to Never.

https://media.howtofix.io/full/images/posts/2020/11/13/16052...

Other distros may vary :)

[jakear]

Thanks, looks like it was set to auto-install security updates and prompt for the others.