apt-get problem

["Mark Ayliffe" <mark.ayliffe.1977@pem.cam.ac.uk>]

I had a problem updating my two unstable machines this morning. I got the
message "Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11 Resource
temporarily unavailable)". Looking through the archive of this illustrious
list I found several suggestions that another copy of dselect (or presumably
apt-get) must be running. This was not so, the first instance happened part
way through the installation phase, after the download was complete. It also
recurred after an init 1.

I found that deleting /var/lib/dpkg/lock did not solve the problem and a new
instance was created on each attempt. However deleting that file and
/var/lib/dpkg/methlock allowed the installtion to complete successfully.

HTH

Mark