Unresolvable problem in update manager

[fiferjim]

Hello, I'm getting the following error message when trying to use the update manager (similar messages appear with apt-get and synaptic):

Could not initialize the package information

A unresolvable problem occurred while initializing the package information.

Please report this bug against the 'update-manager' package and include the following error message:

'E:Malformed Status line, no 3rd word, E:Error occurred while processing libcamel1.2-11 (UsePackage2), E:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/dpkg/status, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.'

This is on a newly installed 8.04 64 bit Ubuntu system, though I believe I'm having hard drive problems. I don't know if they would be related issues. Let me know if you need more info. Thanks.

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please attach the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade to this bug report?

This will greatly aid us in tracking down your problem.

[fiferjim (fifers)]

There are no files in /var/log/dist-upgrade, for some reason. I was able to manually fix the problem though, by editing /var/lib/dpkg/status. For example, package libcamel1.2-11 section looked like this:

Package: libcamel1.2-11
Status: install ok installed*Priority: optional
Section: libs
Installed-Size: 916
Maintainer: Ubuntu Deskt...

with the status and priority all on one line. The * was actually some character with the wrong character encoding, I believe, so I deleted that. Then in another section, It was giving me another error, so I ended up removing a line that had only $. in it, as well as the following paragraph. This was part of the package description. After that, everything worked fine.

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

Closing this report since it was not possible to obtain enough information that would allow to reproduce how this problem originated. Should enough information for this become available, please feel free to add it and reset the status to "new".

Thanks for you time.