Software Updater - Not all updates can be installed

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. When I try to update my system, i get the following error message:

Software Updater - Not all updates can be installed

I googled and some suggested to fix the broken packages using sudo apt-get install -f. But that did not work for me.

When I use apt-get upgrade this is the message I receive:

Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
The following packages have been kept back:
  gir1.2-rb-3.0 gir1.2-totem-1.0 librhythmbox-core8 libtotem-plparser18 libva1
  libvlc5 libvncserver0 linux-generic-lts-utopic
  linux-headers-generic-lts-utopic linux-image-generic-lts-utopic rhythmbox
  rhythmbox-data rhythmbox-mozilla rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
  rhythmbox-plugin-magnatune rhythmbox-plugins smplayer smplayer-themes totem
  totem-common totem-mozilla totem-plugins vlc vlc-data vlc-nox
  vlc-plugin-libde265 vlc-plugin-notify vlc-plugin-pulse
The following packages will be upgraded:
  google-chrome-stable mkvtoolnix mkvtoolnix-gui
3 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 28 not upgraded.
Need to get 53.3 MB of archives.
After this operation, 6,539 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Abort.

What i don't get is why the linux kernel image has the name linux-image-generic-lts-utopic(Why does it contain the word utopic, even though the code name is trusty)? I also looked at the /etc/apt/sources.list. There is no occurrence of the word utopic in it.

Things I have tried

1. Fix Broken Packages using apt-get install -f
2. The commands : apt-get autoremove && apt-get clean && apt-get update

What can i do to make the System Updater to work normal? Thanks in advance

Solution 1

The problem got solved after running sudo apt-get dist-upgrade.

What does this do?

From apt-get man page:

dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade, also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages; apt-get has a "smart" conflict resolution system, and it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the expense of less important ones if necessary. The dist-upgrade command may therefore remove some packages.

Solution 2

I was able to get past this issue, as per a post elsewhere on the net (forget where), by using Synaptic to upgrade my packages. Afterwards, the software updater was no longer complaining, and could fetch/install the updates since then.

Comments

[Amir Uval]

indeed! Worth mentioning that it does not upgrade ubuntu, but only fixes dependencies of installed applications. thanks

[Sebastian G. Marinescu]

This helped, thank you. I had a setting set psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1 which prevented upgrades. Commenting it out and running sudo apt-get install -f solved the problem.

[Mr.P]

fantastic !!!!!

[matanster]

No idea why this is not made clearer what this does and why it not offered as part of the upgrade to 20.04 but rather the error message of this OP will show after the upgrade ...

[Sherri]

Had the same problem and used this solution. However it killed my MySQL installation and I had to re-install.

[Arsenii]

Thank you! Helped me!