Software updater problem

[castromic]

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 from 15.10 using the Software Updater. The upgrade worked well and the software was impressively quick. Since then after 2 or 3 software updates the Software updater has stopped working and the window just hangs.
I have tried
sudo apt update

in a terminal window, but the message
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

is returned.

Any suggestions would be appreciated

[howefield]

Generally that means another instance of apt is already running, eg ubuntu software, synaptic package manager.

Close all software updaters and try the terminal again ?

[wanderer3]

Got this problem tonight on my second laptop (the other one updated a few hours ago). It hangs on software updater when run. I also got the error mentioned when trying to run Synaptic. A reboot and the same thing occurred with the Terminal command sudo apt-get update - it hangs. Bug or server error?

[howefield]

Run top in a terminal and check to see if appstreamcli is running and taking a lot of cpu ?

Ctrl + c to come out of the top program.

[wanderer3]

Run top in a terminal and check to see if appstreamcli is running and taking a lot of cpu ?

Ctrl + c to come out of the top program.


No it's not running.

[howefield]

Could be related to this bug which is affecting a few people.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/appstream/+bug/1583845

Fix is in the works apparently.