Comment 40 for bug 507836

This seems to happen frequently. Also the Synaptic program manager button fails to launch the program after I install the KDE desktop. Interestingly when I go to KDE there are 2 Synaptic buttons in the menu, one works and the other doesn't whereas when I go to Gnome there is only one and it fails but if I type gksu synaptic at the shell prompt it launches just fine. This is a persistent error over the past 3 weeks of installs at least.

The failure of the Ubuntu software centre seems to be based upon how many things you do so if you limit to just one install at a time it works a bit better. I suggest you consider just having the program run as super user maybe... but I haven't probed the problem seriously. I still think the program is very useful-- I flip between command line apt-get/aptitude and synaptic which is the best way to do it anyway. You should install Synaptic as a default so people have the most freedom stop trying to herd people into a certain pathway.