Ubuntu 10.04 Adjustments: Software Source List
I was making some adjustments to my Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) installation. I got kind of bogged down in the Software Sources. This post describes that part of the enterprise.
When I went into Software Sources > Other Software, I now had a whole boatload of items, most of which were marked "disabled on upgrade to lucid." To handle this, I tried Ubuntu Tweak. It was an easy download, double-click to install. I went into Applications > System Tools to run it. Then I went down the list of applications and other items on the left side of its window and selected and adjusted them to taste. I found that I had to exit Ubuntu Tweak and start it again in order to get the prompt that would re-enable my disabled Software Sources.
In Software Sources > Other Software, I noticed several things that didn't look quite right. First, the "Cdrom with Ubuntu 9.10 'Karmic Koala'" was unchecked. This made sense; I wasn't running 9.10 anymore. I selected that item and clicked Remove. I thought I'd put the new CD in its place. I had installed 10.04 via download, not via CD, but in the process of fixing the installation I had downloaded and burned the alternate installation CD. So now I put that into the CD drive and clicked on Add CD-ROM. It gave me this:
Upgrade volume detected
A distribution volume with software packages has been detected.
Would you like to try to upgrade from it automatically?
It looked like the answer to that should be no, so I clicked Cancel. Then I had another error:
Error scanning the CD
E:Unable to locate any package files, perhaps this is not a Debian disc or the wrong architecture?
Apparently the Alternative CD was more different from the ordinary Ubuntu CD than I had realized. I was curious, so I downloaded and burned the official 10.04 CD. While that was underway, I went to the next problem item on the Software Sources list: “Unsupported updates.” The common advice, repeated on a number of websites that seemed to have copied it from one another, was that this would give me programs that I “probably don’t need or even want.” Au contraire, I was thinking that a person would enable this kind of source to get access to solutions to new problems as soon as they were discovered. But for purposes of stability, for now, until I needed them, I decided to go with the flow and leave them unchecked.
Next, I saw that some items were marked as "disabled on upgrade to lucid." According to TualatriX, Ubuntu Tweak > Applications > Source Center would enable only those that supported Lucid. I’m not sure what happened to this particular category of problem; I played around with a couple of things and these went away. Next, some of the titles were not right. In particular, I saw this:
Medibuntu – Ubuntu 9.10 “karmic koala” (http://packages.medibuntu.org/ lucid free non-free)
I didn’t seem to find advice on exactly this problem, so I just selected that item in Software Sources, clicked Edit, and changed the Comment to “Medibuntu – Ubuntu 10.04 ‘lucid lynx.’” These tinkerings led me to the revelations that “Mixing repositories can break your system,” and that I should have made a backup of my list of sources before I started fooling around. The backup, it seemed, could be made with this command:
sudo cp -i /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list_backup
This made me think that I could work up a good source list once and then not have to start from scratch like this in the future. I had already modified the sources list in Ubuntu Tweak, but now I thought I might want to start over. I got out of Software Sources and typed “sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list” in Terminal. I copied the sources.list file suggested in the Ubuntu Guide wiki and used that to replace the contents of sources.list. The two were pretty much the same anyway, but I thought this might clean things up a bit. I saved and exited sources.list and went back into Software Sources. Oddly, it still had some of the items that I had added in Ubuntu Tweak. I went back into sources.list and, no, those other items (e.g., Skype) had definitely not been added to sources.list when I wasn’t looking. Evidently Ubuntu Tweak was maintaining its own list of software sources and was using that to supplement whatever was in sources.list. In Software Sources, I cleaned up the list (added comments, deleted duplicates) and then clicked Close. It gave me the option to Reload, which I did. Now I got an error message:
Could not download all repository indexes
The repository may no longer be available or could not be contacted because of network problems.
This applied to the CD-ROM line I had copied over from the wiki. I closed that dialog. The CD ISO was still downloading, so I couldn’t do anything more about that yet. In the meantime, I went back into Ubuntu Tweak > Source Center > All Categories > Unlock. Sources that I had selected previously were still checked, so UT did seem to be saving its own list somewhere. I refreshed, got the CD-ROM error message again, closed that, installed new applications implied by my selection of sources, and then exited. Trying another approach, I went to the Ubuntu Sources List Generator and selected all of the repositories I would want. I excluded source code repositories, since I did not plan to be working with source code. I clicked “Generate List.” It gave me a replacement sources.list file, plus a list of commands to run to get the keys necessary to make the sources work; but it also looked like those commands were listed in the comments in the sources.list file too. I looked again at Ubuntu Tweak. It had a much longer list of sources, but I thought I could probably do without some. In particular, I didn’t know if I needed a source just for some individual programs. One, "déjà vu dup," was supposed to be a simple backup utility. It was listed in Synaptic and would presumably be updated through there. I hadn’t used it before, but I thought I would give it a try. Likewise for Firefox, Opera, Shutter, deluge-torrent, and others. The list generated by Ubuntu Sources List Generator did include Google, Medibuntu, and other major sources. So I unchecked all of the sources in Ubuntu Tweak, including the Ubuntu Tweak source itself. Then I took another look at sources.list, in the form I had copied from the wiki. It was much more verbose than the one generated by the Ubuntu Sources List Generator, and now that I understood more about it, I didn’t want all those extra comments. In the end, I decided that all I needed from the sources.list file that I had copied from the wiki was the first line, referring to the Ubuntu 10.04 CD-ROM. So I replaced the existing sources.list with this one, provided by the List Generator:
#############################################################
################### OFFICIAL UBUNTU REPOS ###################
#############################################################
deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 10.04 LTS _Lucid Lynx_ - Release i386 (20100429)]/ lucid main restricted
###### Ubuntu Main Repos
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid main restricted universe multiverse
###### Ubuntu Update Repos
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates main restricted universe multiverse
###### Ubuntu Partner Repo
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner
##############################################################
##################### UNOFFICIAL REPOS ######################
##############################################################
###### 3rd Party Binary Repos
#### GetDeb - http://www.getdeb.net
## Run this command: wget -q -O- http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu lucid-getdeb apps
#### Google Linux Software Repositories - http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/index.html
## Run this command: wget -q https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub -O- | sudo apt-key add -
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free
#### HandBrake - http://handbrake.fr/
## Run this command: sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 62D38753
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/handbrake-ubuntu/ppa/ubuntu lucid main
#### Medibuntu - http://www.medibuntu.org/
## Run this command: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ lucid free non-free
#### Mendeley Desktop - http://www.mendeley.com/
## Run this command: no gpg keys supplied
deb http://www.mendeley.com/repositories/xUbuntu_10.04 /
#### muCommander - http://www.mucommander.com/
## Run this command: sudo wget -O - http://apt.mucommander.com/apt.key | sudo apt-key add -
deb http://apt.mucommander.com stable main non-free contrib
#### Ubuntu Tweak - http://ubuntu-tweak.com/
## Run this command: sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 0624A220
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/ubuntu lucid main
#### Wine - https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-wine/+archive/ppa/
## Run this command: sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys F9CB8DB0
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-wine/ppa/ubuntu lucid main
#### X Updates - https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates/
## Run this command: sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys AF1CDFA9
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu lucid main
With that as my new sources.list file, I went back into Software Sources. The entries that had been added previously were still there, along with the new ones listed in my new sources.list file. I deleted the old ones and closed. It asked if it should reload, and I said yes. It said, "Could not download all repository indexes," because I had not yet entered the commands shown in the sources.list (above). So I entered them, one at a time. Some just gave me OK; some gave me other messages and then OK; some seemed to have problems. I went to System > Administration > Update Manager and updated programs. When it was done, I clicked the Check button. It again said "Could not download all repository indexes" and "Please use apt-cdrom to make this CD-ROM recognized by APT." It also said, "Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones used instead." For the CD-ROM, I went into System > Administration > Software Sources > Other Software and clicked the Add CD-ROM button. I inserted the CD. It said, "A volume with software packages has been detected." I didn't want to install anything from the CD-ROM now, so I canceled out of that. When I clicked Close, I was again given an opportunity to Reload, which I took. I clicked Check again in Update Manager. That was apparently the only thing I had needed to fix; there were no errors now. Back in Software Sources, I saw that I had two entries for the CD-ROM. I looked again at sources.list. It had added a duplicate of the CD-ROM line, but it put it as the very first line, not lower down under the "OFFICIAL UBUNTU REPOS" heading as shown above. So I deleted the one (under that heading), saved sources.list, and took another look in Software Sources. There was now just one CD-ROM. I made a trivial change and tried to close; I took the Reload option; all was good. I saved a copy of the revised sources.list file, for use in this or other computers. It was time to return to the main project of updating Ubuntu 10.04.
0 comments:
Post a Comment