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Drew Noakes
Asked: 2013-06-09 16:00:00 +0800 CST

Why are some checkboxes in Software Updater disabled?

  • 772

In Ubuntu 13.04, the Software Updater shows some apps as having updates, but they're non-selectable:

It's not clear why they're greyed out.

On the command line:

$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  gnuplot-nox gnuplot-x11 nvidia-current
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.

Note too that running apt-get dist-upgrade does not cause them to be installed either, as it sometimes does with packages that are kept back. Here's the output:

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  gnuplot-nox gnuplot-x11 nvidia-current
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.

I took @quidage's suggestion, which gives the following. However subsequent upgrades show the same message:

$ sudo apt-get install -f
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
apt

4 Answers

  1. The following packages have been kept back: normally means you have upgrades and not updates of packages.

    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

    will fix this. It will show the following messages...

    The following NEW packages will be installed:

    and

    The following packages will be upgraded:
    • 2

  2. In my case, apt-get --with-new-pkgs upgrade wouldn't solve my issue, but I obtained the package names libodbc1 and wine-stable under The following packages have been kept back:

    xb@dnxb:~$ sudo apt-get --with-new-pkgs upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  libodbc1 wine-stable
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.

    Then simply manually apt install that particular package to see the relevant error details:

    xb@dnxb:~$ sudo apt-get install wine-stable
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
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:
 wine-stable : Depends: wine-stable-i386 (= 5.0.1~bionic)
               Depends: wine-stable-amd64 (= 5.0.1~bionic) but 4.0.3~bionic is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
xb@dnxb:~$ sudo apt-get install libodbc1
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Suggested packages:
  msodbcsql17 unixodbc-bin
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libodbc1:i386
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libodbc1
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 511 kB of archives.
After this operation, 657 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
    • 2

  3. Check the state of your package:

    dpkg --get-selections | grep "name of your package"

    if it shows the status hold the checkbox in the Software Updater window can not be checked.

    To remove the hold run

    sudo apt-mark unhold "name of your package"
    • 0

  4. I had this also:

    $ dpkg --get-selections | grep "gnuplot-nox"
gnuplot-nox                 install

    What I did is to run 

    $ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude upgrade

    and aptitude decided to uninstall gnuplot-nox. After that, I had to install gnuplot package. I don't know what's going on, tough.

    • 0