MUSINGS

Problem installing iTunes on Windows 7 – Apple Mobile Device Service ‘Rolling back action’

Problem installing iTunes on Windows 7 – Apple Mobile Device Service ‘Rolling back action’

I recently came across a problem on a Windows 7 64bit laptop where Apple’s iTunes was failing to recognise a connected iPhone. It was giving a error that the wrong version of iTunes was installed and I should install the 64bit version of iTunes. As I had no idea how what had been performed up until this point I performed a full uninstall of iTunes. I then downloaded the latest version of iTunes 10.5.1 and ran through the installer. At one point during the install I noticed the install gave the message ‘Rolling back action’ and thought to myself this cannot be good.

At the end iTunes indicated it had a problem installing and I should try again. The weird thing is if you didn’t pay attention to the message you could quite easily click on ok and iTunes will work except it’ll fail to recognise any iPod, iPhone or iPad device. To help identify what actually failed to install I checked the windows services management console and found the Apple Mobile Device Service was missing. This makes sense because it’s that service which communicates with the iPhone. The question is why was the Apple Mobile Device Service (AMDS) failing to install?
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How to fix VirtualBox apt updating when you get the error Requires installation of untrusted packages

How to fix VirtualBox apt updating when you get the error Requires installation of untrusted packages

When updating VirtualBox on our Ubuntu server today I received the following error: Requires installation of untrusted package. The action would require the installation of packages from not authenticated sources.

It turns out that the authentication key for the repository had been deleted. Run the following command to resolve this problem Read more about How to fix VirtualBox apt updating when you get the error Requires installation of untrusted packages

How to search for a package in Debian and Ubuntu

How to search for a package in Debian and Ubuntu

If you need to install a package such as mysql server you generally use the apt-get install <package name> command. The trick is getting the package name right. To find the package name, perform a search using the apt-cache command. The syntax is as follows:

apt-cache search mysql

This will return a list of packages which reference mysql. You’ll notice this is a very long list because it’ll include packages which include applications which use mysql databases. To narrow down your search you can use the following command: Read more about How to search for a package in Debian and Ubuntu