I’m trying to install a couple different .deb packages to the AGX Xavier. After authenticating, the installation bar snaps to 100% but unsuccessfully installs the package with no error prompt. I’m guessing that the box is locked down from installing external packages, is there a way around this?
Are you installing on command line with individual packages, and not via apt/apt-get? Prior to any install make sure the system is first updated (or else auto update might be blocking you):
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get upgrade
…once that is done and you know there is no automatic upgrade going on it becomes a lot easier to find out if there is a real error or just something else running at the same time and getting in the way.
This probably is not your problem but I just encountered a dpkg/.deb related problem on R32.1. I built a custom .deb that contained example scripts. The example scripts were to be installed to /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE_NAME/example as is the norm with Debian/Ubuntu distributions. My package installed successfully but the example files were not present! I manually unpacked the .deb with dpkg-deb -x and saw that the files were indeed contained in the .deb.
I traced the problem down to /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/excludes. R32 is configured to exclude most documentation. Removing this configuration file solved my problem.
/etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/excludes:
# Drop all man pages
path-exclude=/usr/share/man/*
# Drop all documentation ...
path-exclude=/usr/share/doc/*
# ... except copyright files ...
path-include=/usr/share/doc/*/copyright
# ... and Debian changelogs
path-include=/usr/share/doc/*/changelog.Debian.*
Ahh, yes! I forgot about that…didn’t see this is about docs (or at least I’m not sure about “external packages”…more detail might be useful if it isn’t a doc/man page package). If the “.deb” included documentation, more recent L4T installs have been set to exclude doc packages. If you are interested in restoring only particular documentation:
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1039546/jetson-agx-xavier/tip-man-pages-and-docs-on-xaviers-r31-0-1-l4t-ubuntu-18-04-/post/5281806/#5281806
There is an actual subtle command line console message if you log in without a GUI. That message tells how to install all of the missing man pages by running the script “unminimize” (located in “/usr/local/sbin/”):
sudo /usr/local/sbin/unminimize
The actual obscure message on how to unminimize is seen via “/etc/update-motd.d/60-unminimize”, but only for some console logins.