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Accepted
Stewart
Asked: 2022-05-14 07:45:53 +0800 CST

Installing docker, getting: `PreDepends: init-system-helpers (>= 1.54~) but 1.51 is to be installed`

  • 772

So these are the install instructions for Docker

After you setup the GPG key and prerequisites it basically consists of:

  1. Getting the (latest) .deb release from the releases page
  2. sudo apt install ./docker-desktop-<version>-<arch>.deb

I was getting the following error:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'docker-desktop' instead of './docker-desktop-4.8.1-amd64.deb'
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies.
 docker-desktop : PreDepends: init-system-helpers (>= 1.54~) but 1.51 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

But if I tried sudo apt upgrade init-system-helpers then I got:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
init-system-helpers is already the newest version (1.51).

What is the solution to this, to install Docker?

apt

2 Answers

  1. After some googling around, this solution proved useful:

    1. wget http://ftp.kr.debian.org/debian/pool/main/i/init-system-helpers/init-system-helpers_1.60_all.deb
    2. sudo apt install ./init-system-helpers_1.60_all.deb
    3. And finally sudo apt install ./docker-desktop-4.8.1-amd64.deb
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  2. Best Answer

    While installing a more recent version of init-system-helpers manually may work for private installations or serve as an ad-hoc workaround, a more stable solutions seems to be an upgrade of the Ubuntu Version to at least Focal and hope that the docker people are not raising the dependency again so soon.

    That may be difficult for a variety of other reasons as well, but the key insight here seems to be that Docker - although otherwise stated in their documentation - does not support Bionic (at least docker-desktop does not, things may be different for other parts of docker).

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