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ilshat@lpt:~$ sudo apt-get install synaptic
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Package synaptic is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package ‘synaptic’ has no installation candidate
  • I have tried doing a sudo apt-get update but that doesn't work.
Jorge Castro
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rohit
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5 Answers5

6

Synaptic is available in the so-called universe repository. If you cannot find that package, it means that you do not have universe enabled. To enable it, follow these steps:

GUI

Open Software Sources and select Community-maintained free and open-source software (universe)

Software Sources

After doing so, you will be asked to reload the software sources and you will be ready to install your package.

Terminal

Open the file /etc/apt/sources.list:

sensible-editor /etc/apt/sources.list

And add the following three lines:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-updates universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-security universe

Note: I'm assuming that you are using Quantal (12.10). If this is not the case, then use lsb_release -c to find the codename of your Ubuntu release and replace quantal with that codename.

Then run sudo apt-get update and install Synaptic.

Andrea Corbellini
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1

Fixing /etc/apt/sources.list was not enough for me:

deb http://br.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted
deb-src http://br.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted

Then I did an apt-get update: got lots of invalid signature errors.

It was company's proxy.

Only then apt-get update worked and I could install packages again.

Community
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jpfreire
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0

Make sure that in Software & Updates (Ubuntu Software tab) Community-maintained free and open-source software (universe) is enabled. Then install synaptic by running in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install synaptic
BeastOfCaerbannog
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wanto p
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0

I used nala package instead of apt-get to fix the issue.

First you have to install it if you can.

sudo apt install nala -y

Then, if you are using ubuntu which in my case was ubuntu jammy, you have to run the command to look for the fastest mirrors

sudo nala fetch --ubuntu jammy

If you are on any other distros, then run sudo nala fetch --help to get how you can complete the remaining part of the command.

I did choose the first 10 mirrors (remember to use spaces when entering multiple mirrors)

However, at some point when I ran sudo nala update there were errors in some of the mirrors. In this case you can go to the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nala-sources.list file to remove the said mirrors.

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nala-sources.list

Now re-run sudo nala update then try installing the package, either using nala or apt or apt-get.

DEMIGA_G
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That error means that the repositories you are using don't have the synaptic package in them, but apt can see other packages refer to the synaptic package. What repository are you using? If you can change back to the defaults (archive.ubuntu.com) then do an apt-get update you should be able to install it.

tgm4883
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