fingerprint-gui in 18.04

Solution 1:

I know this question is a bit old, and you may have already fixed it, but I've ran through this issue as well, and it took me a couple hours to find out what the hell was happening and what should be done to fix it.

Firstly, a quick question: Did you install Cinnamon Flavour (ppa:trebelnik-stefina/cinnamon) in your Ubuntu distro? (I bet you did)

If so, you may be going through the same issue I get, and I ask you to continue reading this, please.

I wrote a README, as follows, describing what to do to fix it. Hope it'll help others as well! Let me know if you have any questions.

What is this?

This is a tutorial to fix your Cinnamon 4.0 installation on your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, in case you lost your Software & Updates application, and can't run it through terminal with sudo software-properties-gtk, and neither commands such as sudo add-apt-repository PPA work.

You are probably encountering the following issue when trying to run any of these commands:

LSB codename: 'bionic'.
This codename isn't currently supported.
Please check your LSB information with "lsb_release -a".

Why is this happening?

When you installed Cinnamon through a PPA repository, it also installed a package called mintsources. This package essentially controls the Software Sources package, which is a Linux Mint version of Software & Updates.

This means your Ubuntu version of software-properties-common, software-properties-gtk and python3-software-properties gets replaced by mintsources.

So when you try to run any command that depends on any of these packages, they will try to find what is your Mint distribution, on the folder "/usr/share/mintsources/", and output an error in case your LSB codename differs from any of the existing distros in the folder. See source: mintsources.py.

How To

Undoing this is pretty simple, altough a little difficult to find the solution on the internet.

First off, download the three official packages of Ubuntu into a temporary folder, by running the following commands:

$ mkdir /tmp/cinnamon-fix/
$ cd /tmp/cinnamon-fix/
$ wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/software-properties/software-properties-gtk_0.96.24.32.1_all.deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/software-properties/software-properties-common_0.96.24.32.1_all.deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/software-properties/python3-software-properties_0.96.24.32.1_all.deb

By the time this README was written, these were the latest versions of each package, according to the sources:

• software-properties-gtk
• software-properties-common
• python3-software-properties

Now you should remove the faulty packages:

$ sudo apt remove --purge software-properties-gtk software-properties-common python3-software-properties -y

Last, remove mintsources package so it doesn't replace the packages you are going to install by its Mint version, and install them through dpkg:

PS: make sure you are inside our previously created folder "/tmp/cinnamon-fix/"

$ sudo apt autoremove mintsources -y
$ sudo dpkg -i *

If the first command tells you this action could be potentially harmful, don't be afraid, you can safely continue this.

To make sure a sudo apt update followed by sudo apt upgrade won't force mintsources to be reinstalled and break your system again, you should now remove the PPA repository through regular Software & Updates package.

Only add it again in case you really need to update something related to this PPA, but be aware you'll have to run through this process again.

Done! :)

Additional info at https://forum.level1techs.com/t/upgrading-to-cinnamon-4-0-on-18-04-dont-forget-one-package/135561. Many thanks to the user FurryJackman.