HN Explorer

25 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 67.5 ms ] thread
feylikurds
It is appstream, fix is:

  cd /tmp && mkdir asfix
  cd asfix
  wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/appstream_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb
  wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libappstream3_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb
  sudo dpkg -i libappstream3*.deb
  sudo dpkg -i appstream*.deb
fit2rule
Can confirm, this fixed it. However, now gotta do the same thing on all the grandma's and neighbors' laptops .. fml ..
noobermin
Here comes the expected complaint: Ubuntu is supposed to be the user friendly distro, right?

It seems an unfair thing to say until you experience it, or your loved one does. My SO uses gnome-ubuntu, and I am at a loss to explain why firefox crashes multiple times a week on her PC. On my gentoo box? I think the browser hasn't crashed randomly in...months? And I am on ~arch at least for firefox so they are the same version afaik.

Gentoo doesn't have as many devoted, paid testers from what I understand as Canonical does, so how is their stability relatively worse?

cyphar
I actually put Arch on my SOs laptop, because I knew that Ubuntu would probably break in some way in a couple of months. But I'd probably go with openSUSE if I needed to reinstall GNU/Linux (the community has put a lot of work into stability as well as having up to date software).
noobermin
Does arch have something like Software in their gnome 3? My SO isn't as into tech stuff and I wanted it to be easier for them to install stuff without having to google or know apt/emerge/pacman
cyphar
Yeah, there's front-ends for pacman. They're usually ... okay. The only issue is that you usually need to install stuff from the AUR (which won't ever get updated by default unless your GUI supports yaourt).
dingaling
The main problem that I have with unattended Ubuntu for family is that eventually /boot fills-up with old kernels and updates start to fail.

I don't believe they have resolved this despite having been a problem for years.

scintill76
How necessary is it to have a separate /boot partition these days though? I have one because my root is LUKS-encrypted, but I think Grub could handle booting from an unencrypted ext4 root. I guess it would still fill up eventually, but maybe not before a re-install for other reasons.
cyphar
On UEFI systems, the /boot partition needs to be FAT32. So there's that. :P
yrro
The UEFI system partition is mounted at /boot/efi. /boot itself can be a regular filesystem, or part of the root filesystem if you have no unusual requirements.
cyphar
Depends what bootloader you use. Gummiboot (thus systemd-boot) can't handle having the EFI loader and the kernels on different partitions (thus having /boot and /boot/efi separate has questionable benefits). Not to mention that full disk encryption causes problems with /boot.
yrro
That isn't necessarily a problem; Debian handles this by means of a kernel postinst hook that copies the newly-installed kernel from its installed location in /boot to /boot/efi/EFI/DEBIAN (or wherever gummiboot expects to find the kernel, I can't remember off the top of my head).

That systemd refuses to support anything other then EFI at /boot puts it into opposition with existing practice (as seen in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE).

digi_owl
I would expect all of those to fall in line with systemd soon enough...
Zardoz84 

    sudo crontab -e
and put this :

    0 5 * * 1 apt-get -y -q autoremove 1>/dev/null
I have it on our servers so we avoid get filled with junk on /boot
oarsinsync
For maintainability, you might want to consider using /etc/crontab or /etc/cron.d or /etc/cron.daily to store this instead of the root user cron. Especially on servers.
carlesfe
Editorialized title?
AgentME
Is it not accurate? Turns out updates had been broken for me too for a while because of this problem.
carlesfe
Given that the original title "Refresh hangs indefinitely, appstreamcli using 100% CPU" wouldn't probably have made the front page, yes, I'd say it has been editorialised for added sensationalism, like "failing all over the world"

For me, that is not accurate. If OP wanted to give a bit more context other than the original title, they could have changed it without adding the sensationalist part, for example, "Ubuntu bug breaks apt-get update" or similar.

zaggynl
This is why you wait for a service pack or point release before using a new version of an OS.
sliken
Doesn't help much. Ubuntu-14.04 LTS had a similar problem last week where network manager crashes and you can't get to the network to fix it.
digi_owl
FFS, we are not going to beat Windows by recreating it!
orblivion
This afternoon, without applying any of the workaround fixes, I somehow was able to apt update and upgrade appstream. Did they somehow make a server-side fix?