A regular reader of It’s FOSS, Chetan Jain contacted me today with this question: How can I fix “Cannot add PPA” error in Ubuntu 14.04. Chetan was trying to install [TLP (power management tool to reduce overheting)][1] and encountered this error:
Please check that the PPA name or format is correct.
If you encounter similar error while adding a PPA in Ubuntu or Mint, don’t worry. It’s one of the (less) common issue with PPA and can be solved easily.
### Fix Cannot add PPA error in Ubuntu and Linux Mint ###
There can be mainly two reasons behind this kind of error. Either the CA certificates on your system are broken or there is a proxy set up in your network.
Let’s first try to reinstall the CA certificates:
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ca-certificates
If the above command doesn’t work, perhaps there is proxy settings involved. To pass proxy settings to sudo, use it with E option in the following manner:
sudo -E add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
This will get the PPA working. Chetan’s issue was solved with the second solution. I hope this quick tip help you as well to get rid of the PPA error. Any questions or suggestions are always welcomed.
