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I searched for my problem but I found no solution related to my specific problem. There was a notification that Firefox needs an update and something like "Ubuntu core" also needs an update. I started updating and after downloading everything, software updater is stuck at this screen (also shown in screenshot) saying "Installing updates..." at top and "configuring unattended-upgrades" at bottom. Clicking details is doing nothing. It is unclickable. What is happening? Thanks for any answer.

screenshot.

rainlover
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  • It's been one hour since this screen started appearing. – rainlover Nov 20 '16 at 01:30
  • I'm having the same thing on a fresh install of 16.04 to a VM. Only a small amount of customization; no other s/w ever installed and this is the first update. I happened to have Details open but nothing interesting showed anyway (just 0.90ubuntu0.2.) I did happen to have the system set to not do upgrades automatically, if that makes any difference. (Being a VM I could use snapshots to try that...) – Deep Thought Nov 21 '16 at 21:16

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I suspect there is a bug in the code that configures unattended-upgrades that assumes the system is actually set up to use automatic upgrading.

I reproduced the bug in a VM that was basically a fresh install of Ubuntu 16.04 x64 off the media and had never had any other software installed or any updates installed. Only some minor reconfiguration had been done.

After it had frozen for a number of hours very similar to your screenshot, I paused and snapshotted the VM, rolled back to a snapshot prior to starting the update, made certain config changes and then repeated my actions down to opening the same things in the dialogs, etc. This time the update completed without issue.

The config changes I made were as follows:

  1. In System Settings->Software & Updates->Updates, set "Automatically check for updates" to "Daily." When the failure occurred this had been set to "Never." Do this first, because otherwise the GUI will clobber the remaining config changes.

    (I think this setting is redundant with APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists, but for some reason setting that directly did not change it in the GUI, so I also changed it in the GUI to be sure.)

  2. Edit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic, replacing the following settings with the ones shown here:

    APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

    These settings had all been 0 when the failure occurred.

You should be able to set these back however you want them once the update is done. Or you could probably just skip the update of unattended-upgrades.

Disclaimers:

  • I had some serious instability related to gnome after the upgrade. A second update & upgrade (done via the apt-get CLI) resolved that so I suspect that was an unrelated issue.

  • Although I strongly suspect, since I repeated almost exactly the same actions from VM snapshots, the bug to be related to the above settings, it is possible the bug is not deterministic, in which case it may have just worked by coincidence.

  • I don't know which of the above changes actually fixed it.

  • There is some small chance that once the bug has been encountered it will automatically affect the next run regardless of settings; keep in mind I did the fix from a VM snapshot which had not 'seen' the initial failure.

Deep Thought
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  • So what "unattended-upgrades" are actually? And also does it has been fixed now in 16.04.2? Anyways I'll just cancel any "unattended-upgrades" if they appeared. Thanks for your answer. – rainlover Apr 13 '17 at 14:35