Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?

I am new at this and i keep get this messge and dont known where to go?

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This is pretty thin information… However, I'm going to assume you are trying to update your Debian/Ubuntu system with apt or apt-get.

Because apt and it's siblings update files on the disc that are part of Linux, it needs to make sure that there is only one apt running at a time. It does this by trying to create and lock a file (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend).

If you start up another apt while another one is running, the second one will fail because the second one cannot acquire the lock.

Since the directory /var/lib/dpkg is not usually writable by ordinary users, apt needs to be run as the super-user to be able to do this. Consequently, either need to be logged into the super-user's account (root) or use sudo to temporarily acquire the super-user's privileges:

sudo apt COMMAND

where COMMAND is the thing you want apt to do.

-- sw

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