After I installed some new software I wasn’t able to update Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The Update Manager was not able to check for updates and when I tried to use the Synaptic Package Manager I hadn’t better results. A reboot was not the right solution and I tested different ways to solve my problem saving the Ubuntu installation in my computer.

Searching on internet I discovered that there are few possible solution to avoid this problem and, in case you have the same bug on your computer, I decided to sum-up the most powerful after I successfully tried them.

First of all you can try to force the update process through the Terminal typing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

If this doesn’t work you will try with this next step:

sudo rm var/lib/dpkg/lock
sudo dpkg --configure -a

Then launch again the Update Manager to verify if you succeed and if nothing happened solve the matter typing:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf
sudo apt-get update

and try again to launch the Update Manager.

In my case this was enough to restore all the Update Manager features and solve the problem. If you have extra problems about this bug or if you want to suggest alternative solutions, please, don’t hesitate to comment this post.