Ubuntu

update-notifier doesn't respect "automatically check for updates: Never"

Asked by Erik Sax

This has been a long-standing problem with various ubuntu installations, and I'm sensing some reticence in doing anything about it. This attitude also seems to be purposeful to try to cajole updates on people who make bad choices due to confusion/fud/paranoia.

apt install fails due to:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), is another process using it?

A great deal of networking is taking place despite setting automatic upgrades to "never". Cycling this doesn't seem to do anything. This action is hostile to programmers and the setting should be respected.

Wisdom on threads is to let it update until it's out of updates, and then it supposedly respects the "never" flag, but the experience I'm having is much more non-deterministic. have been using 19.04 for weeks now and still get the background notifier using data and getting in the way of aptitude package installations. I prefer manual update && upgrade once my code is ready to push.

Is there another way around this or are people just living with it?

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

sudo fuser -vki /var/lib/dpkg/lock;sudo dpkg --configure -a

This will unlock the packages if they unlock has failed. It will free up the packages for you

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Erik Sax (erikjsax) said : 		#2

This isn't really the question/problem at hand, this is a side-effect of the problem in the summary. update-notifier is ignoring a configuration flag and using scarce network resources against my will.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#3

Then I suggest you report a bug

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#4

As far as I know there are two different kinds of updates potentially running in the background, "normal" updates and "security" updates.
see https://i.stack.imgur.com/bvpzn.jpg
There is a setting that "normal" updates are never installed automatically, but I have not found an equivalent setting for "security" updates. It seems to me that the current programs do not allow disabling automatic download and installation of security updates.

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