Why can't I create posts/comments on Lemmy with copy/paste from terminal to show what I did wrong?
So I tried to install a fan script last night. It's supposed to be a 1 line of code.
But even though it's a brand new installation of ubuntu, my system says "No. You need to install curl first"
When I try to do that, my system says "no, you already have a more recent version of curl installed"
I'd love to copy/paste the exact text, so you guys could see what I see, but when I do that, either in comments or in new posts, Lemmy gets confused, and won't post it.
How do I get you guys a copy/paste of this, so you guys can say "Oh, you have to do this this and this"?
Ok, this is becoming what I remember not liking of not understanding linux.
...
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 19245 100 19245 ************* 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0
0 0 4848 Argon Setup
0 0 --:--*************
:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 48598
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend. It is held by process 6408 (unattended-upgr)
N: Be aware that removing the lock file is not a solution and may break your system.
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), is another process using it?
Please also connect device to the internet and restart installation.
bighat@bighat-desktop:~$
...
I have no idea what that lock is, or what to do. I was told "oh, it'll be easy, you just gotta put in this one line of code". Going on 4 years trying to get that fan to work...
Some terminals copy a formatted blob to your clipboard, so you may need to make sure it’s in plaintext before pasting. If you’re using a clipboard manager, look for a “paste without formatting” or similar function, or paste it into a plaintext file first and then re-copy that to make sure it loses the formatting.
The script is complaining that it can't find curl? What is this script that you are using? It's probably got a super-basic check for curl (in the wrong location) that can be modified. (Type in the source URL for it here, or something.)
However, running any script without fully understanding it is not advisable to begin with.
Typing in 'which curl' at the command line should give you the proper location of the existing binary of curl.
There are about a million different flavors of how to download and execute a shell script. Regardless, you need to redirect the output of curl into bash with the -s flag. Bash needs to know that it is reading from STDIN.
Also, if the script is not being read properly, that might explain the dpkg lock issue. Running two instances of dpkg simultaneously is likely causing that collision you are seeing. (If one instance is running, it will touch a lock file and then delete it when it stops. It prevents "bad things" from happening when two instances of the same app want the same resources.)
That is odd if your path is broken. It curl should be in /usr/bin and 'which' should find it. Are you somehow launching another shell inside a shell? Like zsh inside of bash, or something in that flavor? (In some rare cases, that would break paths and profile configs for your active shell.)
Regardless of why curl isn't being found, or only partially found, or something, learn "env". You need to get a decent picture of what your working environment is and why something as basic as curl "isn't found". ('which' is about as a baseline of a command as there is.)
It's not that. I've hand typed comments far longer than this pasted text. This is like 4-5 sentences worth of text, whereas I've hand typed mini novels here, essentially.