Apt

Freeplane, a fork of the mind-mapping program, Freemind, works really well. Except for the fact that in my (K)Ubuntu installation, it sometimes hangs in the middle of editing a node. Once it becomes non-responsive, the only fix is to kill the process and restart the program. The version of Freeplane in Ubuntu 18.04 is 1.6.13. However, the current version (March 2019) of Freeplane is 1.7.7. So, it's highly possible that upgrading Freeplane to the latest version will fix this issue.

On a fresh Debian 8 (Jessie) install, I found that I couldn't update the package repository using apt because security.debian.org was always timing out. While I initially thought this was because of a mirroring issue oslt, it turns out that it's because I was trying to access it via the IPV6 that my VPS was using. Turns out that the fix is reasonably straightforward. You simply tell apt not to bother with ipv6 and simply use ipv4 … like so:

echo 'Acquire::ForceIPv4 "true";' >> /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99force-ipv4

So, here I was writing a script that would automate the installation of a package in Ubuntu 14.04 and all was going swimmingly. Until I ran it. You know how some apt-get installs sometimes involve a technicolor pop-up that asks you for stuff? Well, those pop-ups interrupted my script which didn't proceed further. After much digging, I found that there are a couple of solutions for this:

I recently had trouble with a MySQL installation in Ubuntu. For some reason or the other, during an upgrade to a newer version of mysql-server, the upgrade script had issues stopping the server and the script failed. This meant that apt could no longer function as it kept raising a red flag over the broken upgrade with the following instructions:

Attempting to update flashplugin on Ubuntu Precise resulted in an error. Removing the package and reinstalling it resulted in the following:

I ran into this issue a couple of days ago and cannot recall the exact error message. However, the problem was effectively that aptitude could not install the new kernel update because my partition had apparently run out of space. An interrupted update to Klipper is one thing and the Linux kernel a whole 'nother kettle of fishies. Thinking that I simply needed to free up some space on my partition, I checked the current status via df.

I ran into the following error when I added a new repository to my kubuntu box and ran apt-get update:
E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room. Please increase the size of APT::Cache-Limit. Current value: 123123. (man 5 apt.conf)

To fix this, navigate to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d and edit the file related to debconf which in my case was 70debconf. Add the following line to the bottom of this file and save it:
APT::Cache-Limit "200000000";

Earlier today, I noticed - in htop - that a particular process, let's say 'foo-123', was running even though I had removed the package 'foo' many days earlier. I tried removing it again and found that I was right and that the package had already been removed. The package dependency list was way too long for me to go removing them one by one, or parsing them out and removing the lot.

If you ever find yourself running into a monotonous

"The following packages have been kept back"

error message when you run sudo apt-get upgrade, then the "fix" is to either run apt-get dist-upgrade which is quicker, but sounds more ... dangerous or to run apt-get install [package list] where package list is a list of all packages that have been kept back.