I am unable to update or install software in the AppCenter

Question

I've been using Loki for about 3 weeks. Installing software and updates was working fine. I booted into Loki today and got a notification that I had 4 updates available. The red flag also appeared on the App Center icon on the dock. I launched App Center and clicked on the Update tab. The Update window had the following error message: "No Results. No apps could be found. Try changing search terms."

I also tried to install two different software programs: virtualbox and gdebi. I tried them each separately. I had the same result both times. After clicking on the Install button the Starting progress bar appeared. I waited 5 minutes with each program and nothing else happened - no progress was shown on the progress bar. I clicked the Cancel button and the installation was canceled each time.

I have no idea as to what I should do next. Anybody have any suggestions?

Answer 1

A fix for this specific issue has just been released in the form of a new packagekit version. If this is not applied automatically, you can do it with the following two commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install packagekit

Detailed instructions can be located at https://medium.com/elementaryos/important-update-released-501c9d9f28b

Answer 2

This is similar (not identical) to a bug in Loki reported recently.

Please mark yourself as affected here (in case you are not the one who opened the bug) if you feel this bug represents your issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/appcenter/+bug/1628324

Answer 3

Another issue on appCenter may be related to warning/error messages that generates freezing loops.

• on console, use sudo apt update and check for any warning messages:

  

• I solved that problem removing the address package from the package list on /etc/apt/sources.list

Answer 4

I have a problem like you

you need open terminal and do this command :

sudo apt update
sudo apt install packagekit
sudo dpkg --configure -a

When you run "sudo dpkg --configure -a" the system need your new enroll key machine type and retype

after that viola!! your appcenter running well again!!

Answer 5

Need to report the AppCenter bug. Ubuntu Software updater currently fetch Ubuntu base, kernel and other software updates but I did not find any elementary base updates. I don't know whether Software updater fetches elementary base updates too.

Answer 6

In my case, the app center stopped to work (updates and new install) after removing some apps that I didn't want anymore.

What I did to back it work again is to install all packages required to build the appcenter. Just follow the list on the git repository (https://github.com/elementary/appcenter):

sudo apt-get install intltool libappstream-dev libgee-0.8-dev libgranite-dev libgtk-3-dev libjson-glib-dev libpackagekit-glib2-dev libsoup2.4-dev libunity-dev libxml2-dev libxml2-utils valac