Debian – Lenovo ix4-300d – apt-get not working

debianlampnetwork-attached-storage

I just bought a NAS (Lenovo ix4-300d) that's running Debian, and I just found out how to enable SSH. I want to install Apache, MySQL and PHP for local development.

When I'm trying to use apt-get, I get the following error:

login as: root
root@192.168.1.76's password:
root@ix4-300d:/# apt-get install php5
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (2 No such file or directory)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?
root@ix4-300d:/# su
sh-3.2# apt-get install php5
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (2 No such file or directory)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

Even though I sued to get root access, it still tells me I'm not root when trying to use apt-get.

How do I fix apt-get here?

Best Answer

Well, it looks like for some reason, Debian was unable to open up the lock file apt uses. This seems to be a massively common thing according to Google.

This seems to be a logical solution - that /var/lib/dpkg/lock dosen't exist - so checking for the existence of and creating /var/lib/dpkg/ might help.

If it also complains that /var/lib/dpkg/status doesn't exist, you should be able to copy it from a backup by doing cp /var/backups/dpkg.status.0 /var/lib/dpkg/status as root.

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