So here I am again, in Ubuntu. As I have said before, I have a love hate relationship with using Linux Distros. I have a trusty Odroid XU4 SOC, which I love to fire up from time to time when I'm developing network applications. This time, I'm thinking of making it into a full-time sever that will provide some key services. The two most obvious services being a file server and media server. For the purpose of file sharing, I will install and use Samba and for media sharing I will install and use Plex.
The exercise began with formatting a 32 GB micro SD card and placing a bootable version of Ubuntu Mate 20.04 using the 5.4 Linux kernel. The XU4 has two lights, a solid red light which signifies that the device is on and a blue light that blinks on and off to signify that the device is busy. The XU4 boots in to Ubuntu Mate and all is well. That is, until I realize my mouse has a short, and it's the only wired mouse I have. No problem, that's what Team Viewer is for. I can operate things from my laptop remotely. So I fiddle with the defective mouse until I open a web browser and download the Team Viewer Host package (a special version for ARM devices). Now I just need to install and..............nope.
Error “waiting for unattended-upgr to exit”. The Unattended-upgrade service has a similar function to Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) in that it handles system upgrades in the background. This service, like its name, is unattended and can trigger at any time. Unattended-upgrade uses dpkg, a package manager built into Debian-based systems. Debian, and its derivatives, limits dpkg to only one instance at any time, and for obvious reasons. You don't want to have multiple installations messing things up (was that a shot at windows?). So it became clear that I needed this service stopped before I can move forward. Now I have a choice, disable the service or uninstal the service. Despite whatever I choose, I first have to stop the service, but since it's active we will have to terminate the process.
Time to fire up the terminal. We meet again, my old friend (sometimes I wonder why I even bother using the GUI in Linux based systems). First, I needed to find the PID of the Unattended-upgrade service.
sudo ps ax | grep Unattended-upgradesSomething like will appear
930 ? S 0:05 /etc/apt/...
In this case the PID is 930, and we will use the kill command to stop the service
sudo kill 930Now we can proceed to install all our applications and then restart the service. If you don't want your Debian distro to update automatically then disable the service.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgradesA prompt appears allowing you to decide whether you want to keep the service running. Select No. Finally, at this point, you can safety remove the service without harming your OS.
sudo apt remove unattended-upgradesNow that all that is finished, I can finally install my Team Viewer software, which I do, and remotely control my Odroid XU4. Happy Days! Now to finally set up file sharing....but that's for another post.