up vote 21 down vote favorite
7

I cannot install any package. It seems the command apt-get update must be run but it throws some errors:

$ sudo apt-get update
Get:1 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security InRelease [102 kB]     
Hit:2 http://ve.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease                     
Hit:3 http://ve.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates InRelease             
Hit:4 http://ve.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports InRelease           
Fetched 102 kB in 23s (4337 B/s)                                               
*** Error in `appstreamcli': double free or corruption (fasttop): 0x000000000210f4b0 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(+0x777e5)[0x7fac8d8317e5]
[...]
Aborted (core dumped)
Reading package lists... Done
E: Problem executing scripts APT::Update::Post-Invoke-Success 
 'if /usr/bin/test -w /var/cache/app-info -a -e /usr/bin/appstreamcli; 
 then appstreamcli refresh > /dev/null; fi'
E: Sub-process returned an error code

Full terminal output.txt

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1  
Related bug: bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=822317 – Elder Geek Oct 29 at 23:34
up vote 31 down vote accepted

This worked for me (From here, https://forum.siduction.org/index.php?topic=6174.0):

sudo apt-get purge libappstream3
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2  
What about the side effects? What caused this issue? – EdParadox Aug 9 at 18:20
3  
@EdParadox This happened to me yesterday when updating the software in Ubuntu 16.04 immediately after installing it in VirtualBox with the command sudo apt upgrade. This answer worked for me. I was getting many other Apport error notifications at the same time. After updating Oracle VirtualBox and Oracle VirtualBox Extension Pack to the latest version these errors disappeared. I checked in /var/crash/ and verified that all of these errors were related to appstream which has libappstream3 as a dependency. – karel Aug 10 at 7:38
5  
@EdParadox The cause? In my case, the error just happened with no apparent reason, when running sudo apt-get update command in Terminal. The side effect? Nothing apparent besides these packages appstream gnome-software libappstream3 being removed. – clearkimura Aug 11 at 7:50
    
I also had this issue on a fresh install of XUbuntu on VirtualBox. Have no idea why this happens, maybe it has something to do with the virtualisation. But the purge fixed it. – Lion Sep 9 at 13:11
    
@Lion Just did a completely fresh install of XUbuntu 16.04 here on real hardware, I got it right away; I've never had this happen before on any other Linux distro; I'd take a guess and say that there might be something wrong with the installer. – jrh Sep 30 at 3:35
up vote 12 down vote 
sudo apt install --reinstall libappstream3

can fix it.

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up vote 1 down vote

In my case, purging, or re-installing didn't help.

The removal of the apt.conf.d entry did however solve the issue for me.

Friday 25 August  22:17:45 AEST 2017
LSB Version:    core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch:printing-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:printing-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch
    Distributor ID: Ubuntu
    Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
    Release:    16.04
    Codename:   xenial

I ran the following commands to get rid of the error:

sudo apt-get purge libappstream2
sudo rm /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50appstream
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