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I would like to install dconf-editor on Ubuntu 17.04 64-bit. This tutorial suggests it should be pretty easy - running apt install dconf-editor should be sufficient. It does not work however and prints this message instead:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package dconf-editor

What happened to the dconf-editor package?

Additional details

  • apt-cache policy dconf-editor returns:

    N: Unable to locate package dconf-editor

  • apt update does not help.

Mateusz Piotrowski
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2 Answers2

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If you have rmadison installed you can simply run:

rmadison dconf-editor | grep zesty

to find out if this package is available for zesty. here is my output:

 dconf-editor | 3.23.4-0ubuntu1 | zesty/universe   | source, amd64, arm64, ...

So it's there and it's in universe component; to find out if you have access to install it run:

apt-cache policy dconf-editor

If you get nothing, I guess something is wrong with your sources.list, run:

grep "^deb " /etc/apt/sources.list

to check your sources.list file; you should have some lines look like this:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ zesty universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ zesty-updates universe

If you dont, add them, update your sources; then install the program.

Ravexina
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0

It turns out that my /etc/apt/sources.list didn't have the default repositories - they must have been overwritten - and this is why I couldn't install anything with apt.

The solution is to restore the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list:

  1. If you're lucky then you've got a backup file /etc/apt/sources.list.save from which you can restore the list of repositories.

  2. Otherwise, I've found this website which is able to generate a list of repositories from scratch: https://repogen.simplylinux.ch/.

  3. Also as Ravexina added in the comments:

    You can also use this file to restore your sources: /usr/share/doc/apt/examples/sources.list, just change the codename and add your desired components.

Mateusz Piotrowski
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