Special update information for Fedora 21 users: PackageKit errors

We have found some bugs in PackageKit and related components which require an update to fix. Unfortunately, the bugs can prevent Fedora Workstation’s default update mechanism – the ‘offline update’ system, where a notification of new updates appears, and you reboot to install them – from working correctly. The bugs can also cause problems with software installation and/or removal when using GNOME Software or Apper (the KDE software manager).

If you have tried to do an offline update recently, you may have seen a notification that it failed.

If you usually apply system updates using the ‘offline update’ mechanism or another PackageKit-based application, then to resolve this problem, we recommend that you run the following
command with root privileges:

yum update --advisory=FEDORA-2015-0921

To do this, for instance, if you are an admin user, you can run:

sudo yum update --advisory=FEDORA-2015-0921

Or if you have the root password, you can run:

su -c 'yum update --advisory=FEDORA-2015-0921'

either way, a few packages including PackageKit and libhif should be updated. You may then wish to reboot the system (though in most cases it should not be necessary).

Usually, this should be sufficient to resolve the bugs in question, and you can then do future system updates using the ‘offline update’ system. If you continue to have problems, you should run this command:

pkcon repair

and then reboot the system. If you still have problems after this, please file a bug report.

We do sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by these bugs.

Using Software

10 Comments

  1. Ricardo

    This bug was present in fedora 20 but I didn’t know how to file a bug about so I though it was fixed in fedora 21 but a few days ago I couldn’t apply an update because of this, so I had to do it using yum update to complete the update.

  2. icywind

    Great! It worked.

  3. kparal

    Contrary to Adam’s post, I recommend everyone to definitely reboot after applying this update, it’s just a safer thing to do. If you can’t reboot, at least restart the packagekit service:

    sudo systemctl restart packagekit.service

    It’s true that this is not necessary to make offline upgrades work again, but it is necessary to make gnome-software (or apper) work again. So unless you reboot or restart packagekit, I don’t recommend you to use gnome-software or apper, they might corrupt your rpm database indices (

    pkcon repair

    and reboot should fix that, if it happens).

  4. Daniel

    What’s the “offline update”?? The one you do through the Software app?

    • Yes, exactly. “Offline” refers to the fact that the updates are applied when you reboot rather than when the system is running — “online” in the old pre-Internet sense.

  5. murray

    Error message from apper on trying to install any program. All the list(s) are also empty. It looks like the url name is messed up. On a new fedora install it worked fine then after several packages are installed it fails. Ran update and repair per notes above. NG
    Error window display
    A problem that we were not expecting has occurred.
    Please report this bug with the error description.

    also pkcon repair fails with same message
    [root@officelinux-localdomain WebDesignBk1]# pkcon repair
    Failed to contact PackageKit: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.PackageKit: Timeout was reached

    Activation of org.freedesktop.PackageKit timed out

    • That looks like a slightly different type of issue; could you file a bug on it (against PackageKit), and include the output of ‘journalctl -b’ run as root? Sorry for the trouble, and thanks! If you’re not confident about reporting bugs, let me know and I’ll help out.

      • murray

        I have reported this bug in PackageKit and attached the log file #1188455
        Thanks for your quick response.
        Murray

  6. Shams Saki

    i tried it. but dont work.
    it says
    [root@localhost aj]# yum update –advisory=FEDORA-2015-0921
    Loaded plugins: langpacks, priorities
    Bad id for repo: comments abridged, byte = 8

    File contains no section headers.
    file: file:///etc/yum.repos.d/home:sarimkhan.repo, line: 1
    ‘\n’

    my ‘journalctl -b’ result is:
    […snip…]

    • The problem is because you’ve created an invalid extra repo definition that is causing yum to fail. Either fix or remove that file. The file name is shown in the error above: /etc/yum.repos.d/home:sarimkhan.repo

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