Fix your empty Add/Remove software list

February 11th, 2009

I recently had a problem with Ubuntu 8.10 where my Add/Remove… software window was empty.

My empty Add/Remove software list

My empty Add/Remove… software list

Synaptic and apt-get via the terminal worked great, but Add/Remove… was broken. A bit of searching turned up this little gem that did the trick of restoring the list. Just run these two commands in your terminal:

sudo apt-get remove gnome-app-install
sudo apt-get install gnome-app-install apturl ubufox ubuntu-desktop

Posted in Software, Tips, Ubuntu | 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Fix your empty Add/Remove software list”

  1. Mike Kelly Says:
    March 10th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

    Thanks, I was having this same issue and those two commands fixed it. i probably could have found it somewhere else, but this was nice to have the fix right there at the top of the page without have to read through a bunch of forum posts.

    Thanks again,

    Mike Kelly

  2. Evert Jan Says:
    March 18th, 2009 at 9:43 am

    Thanks for sharing this. I was having the same problem but it is solved now. :)

  3. Jachin Sheehy Says:
    March 31st, 2009 at 4:18 pm

    There’s a simpler process documented here:
    http://thetoddtoday.com/2009/03/22/fix-addremove-applications-list-empty-ubuntu-linux-810/

    Involves just one step

    sudo apt-get install gnome-app-install –reinstall

  4. Jachin Sheehy Says:
    March 31st, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    Blog ’smart typography’ filters always ruin shell commands :)

    That’s supposed to be 2 hyphens before the “reinstall”, NOT an em-dash.

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