I can't use apt-offline to update my package lists, which means that I will get many 404s when trying to install older versions of packages that it thinks it's downloading from the .sig file it generates.
I can apt-get --simulate install or upgrade, but I can't simulate update (as in package lists), and it says "E: command line option --simulate is not understood." On my Ubuntu machine (connected to the internet) I can apt-get --simulate update just fine and it will simulate an update on any account.
Linux – Debian: updating package lists with apt-offline, –simulate not understood for apt-get update
aptdebianlinuxoffline-filesUbuntu
Best Answer
I got this same error as well with the latest version of Ubuntu. I'm not on the machine that had these issues at the moment, but I figured out a workaround.
First, locate the python files that are used by apt-offline, if memory services I think it was /usr/lib/python2.7/distribution-files/apt_offline_core/ or something like that. There's a file I think called apt_offline_core.py and in there is a single line that executes the command "apt-get update -qq --simulate --print-uris update". I changed the line by removing the --simulate (I don't think --simulate is necessary, given that --print-uris makes apt-get not actually do anything) and also I had to remove one of the -q's. So it now read:
apt-get -q --print-uris update
This worked. Apparantly the bug is in the apt-get package, and not apt-offline itself. I am running an older installation of ubuntu with an older version of apt-offline and that installation works and the line of code with --simulate is unchanged. So the bug is in the apt system.