I was totally annoyed by "Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable) E: Unable to lock the list directory" error recently. I used to get this error, but not this frequent anytime before. And I had to completely restart the system to avoid getting the error message. Here are some of the things that can went wrong.
- Make sure Synaptic is not open.
- Also make sure that, update manager is not working(which is a usual case scenario)
- Now all of the above cases does not fit, which unfortunately is my case, you can do the following.
sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/lock
- Removing lock is probably not an ideal solution. But it actually worked for me. Let me know your feedback on this.