Ubuntu 9.04 broken

[cwarn23]

Is it just me or has Ubuntu 9.04 become broken by not allowing any software to be installed. I have done two clean installs and still the synaptic package manager does not show any items that are not installed. Also I am unable to install any software from the command line. Has the creators of Ubuntu put a lock on version 9.04 because this is really annoying. The software worked before I reinstalled Ubuntu but does anybody have any ideas? I'm just trying to install Apache, mysql, php, webmin and virtualmin.

[IsharaComix]

I'm on Ubuntu 9.04 and experiencing no trouble at all.

Have you tried changing your package server? You can go to System->Software Sources and pick a different server to see if that does anything interesting. It might be your local repository is down.

If that doesn't work, you can always (at worst) download the .deb files and install them by hand.

[cwarn23]

I just spoke to someone on an irc chat room and found out the following command seems to solve it. Don't know why?

apt-get update

[necrolin]

"apt-get update" updates the list of available packages so your system knows what can actually be installed.

Did the solution work for you?

[cwarn23]

Did the solution work for you?

Indeed it did. Don't know why a fresh install needed such a procedure.

[necrolin]

It's because the packages would have been updated since the official release. You should update your software listing before installing new software. This way you ensure that what your package manager has listed as available software is in sync with what's on the servers.

Another way to look at it is imagine that locally your computer thinks that it should install Apache-2.0.deb (version 2.0), but the servers have been updated to Apache-2.5.deb (version 2.5). The package manager should indicate that something's wrong in this case because it can't install the version that it thinks it should install.