Major problems with wget and gpg installing Signal in whonix-workstation

Hi all

I first tried installing signal in the whonox-workstation terminal via the official documentation, this failed and I ended up getting this error after installing wget.

[template workstation user ~]% wget -O- https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | gpg --dearmor > signal-desktop-keyring.gpg;
cat signal-desktop-keyring.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg > /dev/null

--2025-06-05 17:13:30--  https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc
Resolving updates.signal.org (updates.signal.org)... failed: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution.
wget: unable to resolve host address ‘updates.signal.org’
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
zsh: exit 4     wget -O- https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | 
zsh: exit 2     gpg --dearmor > signal-desktop-keyring.gpg

Sadly, I found this thread and made it worse

So I then ran this, and encountered this problem. Now even running sudo apt update alone prompts this scary error message:

[template workstation user ~]% curl -sx http://127.0.0.1:8082 https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg &>/dev/null
[template workstation user ~]% sudo apt update && sudo apt install signal-desktop
Reading package lists… Done
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock. It is held by process 1441 (apt-get.anondis)
N: Be aware that removing the lock file is not a solution and may break your system.
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
zsh: exit 100 sudo apt update

Does anyone have any idea how to first rectify the new error message, then install Signal on whonix-workstation?

I don’t mind doing a complete reinstall of Qubes, as I just did it, however I’d be stuck on part 1 still!

Thanks in advance.

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Based on your logs, it seems that the apt lock indicates an update check is already ongoing.

If you try again now, does it say the same thing?

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Hi,

No idea what happened. I just turned off qubes and tried again (update & installing signal command) and it worked!

So one of the solutions I did detailed in the first post definitely worked.

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