update manager hangs in hardy alpha 4

[mike]

I synced to alpha 4 yesterday Sunday 3rd Feb 2008.
Today 4th, the update manager tell me there are 7 updates, but it hangs when I try to apply them
1st on the list was language-pack-en, last was transmission-gtk

[mike (ubuntu-holmesfamily)]

I notice a possibly related symptom since updating, sudo fails with the message
sudo: unable to resolve host "my host name"

[mike (ubuntu-holmesfamily)]

I went and repaired the damage to /etc/hosts, the update then ran and actually got to ask for the pasword, now how ever I get the following
E: ERROR: could not create configuration directory /home/root/.synaptic - mkdir (2 No such file or directory)

[mike (ubuntu-holmesfamily)]

I manually made that dir as root, and this has curred the immediate problem

[Richard Hurt (rnhurt)]

I am experiencing something similar in the final Hardy Heron release. When I run Update Manager from the applet it hangs just before asking for my password. This has been happening ever since I upgraded (in-place) to Heron from Gutsy. I have tried letting it run for hours and killing it and restarting it but nothing works. Killing Update Manager and then running "aptitude safe-upgrade" from the command line works fine.

One other clue that pointed me to this issue was that my machine is having trouble resolving it's host name for some reason. The "hostname" command works fine but adding any options fails with a "hostname: Unknown hostname" error. My /etc/hosts file looks fine but I'm guessing that something is messed up somewhere.

[Richard Hurt (rnhurt)]

OK, I think I might have found it. Looking through this <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=613521&page=2">thread</a> it appears as though the local machine's entry in /etc/hosts is not quite right. My /etc/hosts was originally:

    127.0.0.1 localhost
    127.0.1.1 Udesktop.example.com

And I changed it to:

    127.0.0.1 localhost
    127.0.0.1 Udesktop Udesktop.example.com

After this change I killed and restarted Update Manager and it worked without problems. I'm guessing there should be a bug opened with Update Manager so that if the hosts name cannot be determined it will at least throw a dialog box up to complain. Hanging the system just because it cant resolve its own name is not a good thing.

[thecure (keith-k)]

Same Problem now in the release 64 bit Hardy- verified on laptop and desktop yesterday- update manager hangs and sudo reports unable to resolve host. (This happens after changing Domain name in Network settings - instead of changing the workgroup name in smb.conf it's adding the domain name to the alias 127.0.1.1 in the hosts file. Since this is the first time I've experienced this problem and I've changed domain name before in network settings and my lack of knowledge I do not know if this is desired effect but changing the alias 127.0.1.1 to show only the computer name fixes the issue with sudo and update manager as the previous posters suggest. Changing the workgroup name in smb.conf allows Vista machines to connect to me again.)

[Kzin (wmkzin)]

+1 to Richard's post
I did not have to change 127.0.1.1 to 127.0.0.1 as the example implies, but I added the extra "Udesktop" and voila.
Using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Release)

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport

This sounds like it is a duplicate of a bug in gksu #237325. Could you please install the new version of libgksu2-0 from hardy-proposed and let me know if that fixes the hang?

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Intrepid Ibex. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

I'm closing this report because we've got no response to our last request. Feel free to reopen if it's still an issue.