Unable To Download Updates

I’m brand new to Linux. PureOS is the very first time I’ve ever used Linux in my entire life, so please bear with me if I’m asking an extremely “newbie” question. Anyways, I just recently got my PureOS installation up and running, and I noticed in the software manager that I have updates available. However, whenever I try to download and install them, I’m met with an error message “Unable to download updates: the following packages have unmet dependencies”. I’m not sure what to do from here. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Do you know how to open a terminal? It should be available in the list of applications.

There you can type sudo apt update to refresh the list of available packages.

After that, try sudo apt upgrade and then copy paste what you get back in the terminal to the forum here, then we can see what is the problem.

These two commands do essentially the same as clicking “search for updates” in the software manager, but they are usually better at explaining what is going wrong and it is easier to copy their output to someone else trying to help you :wink:

Also it would be interesting whether you are using PureOS on a Librem device or something else and how you installed it.

And, a general recommendation:

Any time you paste your terminal output publicly, you might want to first check if it contains anything you want to keep private (your username, computer name, identifying device numbers, etc. If so, alter it in some way to anonymize it before pasting it.

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No need to worry about that. It’s a throwaway box with no personal information on it. In fact, my username for this box is Jack Sparrow same as my forum name. :grin:

With that being said, I won’t mind pasting all of the information if that helps solve this issue.

First output for sudo apt update:

captain_sparrow@Black-Pearl:~$ sudo apt update
[sudo] password for captain_sparrow: 
Hit:1 https://www.perfect-privacy.com/repos/linux/debian perfect-privacy-vpn InRelease
Get:2 https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium InRelease [5,851 B]             
Get:3 https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-security InRelease [4,581 B]
Get:4 https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-updates InRelease [4,580 B]
Fetched 15.0 kB in 1s (11.2 kB/s)   
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
154 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.

The output of running sudo apt upgrade was so crazy long that I’m not going to paste it to this forum. Instead, I’m going to upload a text file with the output pasted inside. Here’s the output: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hyvjt7kzl22jlk5/UpgradeDump?dl=0

Hope this helps.

This looks good, you installed a lot of updates!
Though the file did not show whether the whole process finished successfully.
Also, it said:

The following packages have been kept back:
  fwupd

To also upgrade that package you can try again sudo apt update and then sudo apt dist-upgrade.

For copying long output, a pastebin is nicer than Dropbox ( where we first have to download the file and we get bothered with ads making us sign up for Drobox :wink: ). Here is one of many such options: https://bin.disroot.org/

You can paste long blocks here, too, and just add three backwards apostrophes ( ` ), found on the same key as the character ~, as the top line and bottom line, with your text starting on the 2nd line and the final ``` on the line below your last line of text.

Then your text will be enclosed in a shorter, scrollable window.

Actually, I was able to update fwupd using the Synaptic Package Manager as mentioned in another post I started here. Thanks for the disroot mention. I’ll be sure to check it out.

Thank you for this formatting advice. I’ll be sure to bookmark this for later use.

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