[PlanetCCRMA] Apt/Synaptic

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

>    I updated both apt and synaptic, and now anything I do in Synaptic
> crashes the GUI with the message, "Unknown Error" (well duh!). Apt hangs
> alot with no error messages. running tail -f /var/log/messages tells me
> nothing.

Is this under rh 8? If so you probably have a hung rpm or apt process.
Do a "ps axuw" and see if there are rpm and/or apt processes that should
not be there. Try to kill them ("kill pid" - pid is the process
identifier number). Most probably you will not be able to, and will have
to "kill -9 pid" them. This is a known rpm bug in 8. After doing the
kill -9 you have to erase some db files that have locks in them, do a:
  ls /var/lib/rpm/__db*
You will probably see three files with that name. Erase them (after you
kill the processes). After that apt or rpm should not hang. 

-- Fernando