Cannot do updates with synaptic, updatemanager or apt-get
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
synaptic (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
I cannot do updates with UpdateManager, Synaptic or apt-get.
UpdateManager fails with the following:
E: /var/cache/
That error stays the same, only the nameof the package changes based on what I select or deselect in UpdateManager.
Synaptic give the same error, again with only the package name changed, based on what package(s) I selected in Synaptic to install.
With apt-get the follwoing happens, regardless of what I try to install:
[root@redbarchetta] 19:27:41 [3]~> apt-get install amarok-engines
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
amarok-engines
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/884B of archives.
After unpacking, 20.5kB of additional disk space will be used.
(Reading database ... dpkg: error processing /var/cache/
files list file for package `gnome-user-guide' contains empty filename
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/
Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
[root@redbarchetta] 19:41:31 [4]~>
And a remove results in this:
[root@redbarchetta] 19:42:46 [6]~> apt-get remove bittorrent
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
bittorrent gnome-btdownload ubuntu-desktop
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking, 676kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... dpkg: error processing ubuntu-desktop (--remove):
files list file for package `gnome-user-guide' contains empty filename
dpkg: ../../src/
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg exited unexpectedly
[root@redbarchetta] 19:42:54 [7]~>
Synaptic and update-manager both use apt-get on the backend, so it's expected that all three give you the same behavior.
It looks like you have one or more packages in the dpkg cache that are corrupted, perhaps by an interrupted Internet connection during a download. I suggest cleaning out the cache, updating the available packages, and then reinstalling, which will have the effect of downloading a new package and attempting to install it.
Try this:
~> aptitude clean
~> aptitude update
~> aptitude reinstall amarok-engines
If that doesn't fix the issue, then do this:
~> dpkg --configure -a
Then report back the results of the foregoing.
A bigger issue is why this happened in the first place. Do you know of anything unusual that happened when the packages were originally downloaded?