synaptic will not start after CPU swap

[stg]

OMFG! off topic but this is funny! I entered "head up butt" in the reason for edit field and it roasted all my beans and says "spilled the beans"

Now that right there is funny!

Yeah, I used yours, missed the hardy comment, not doing so well today, changed it back and it doesn't seem to have broken anything worse.

I need to find a sources.list for my distro or figure out which is the "status line"

Hey, thanks for your help cholericfun!!

[cholericfun]

"spilled the beans"

that actually is quiet brilliant.
now youre back to 1, you can try out all sort of combinations

[stg]

OK, I have located and tried a couple of sources.list files. If I use a known broken one I get its expected error message. If I fix it I'm back to

E: Malformed 1st word in the Status line
E: Error occurred while processing libglew1.5 (UsePackage2)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/dpkg/status
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
E: _cache->open() failed, please report.

so I don't think the problem is actually in sources.list

here is the beginning of /var/lib/dpkg/status

Package: gcdmaster
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: sound
Installed-Size: 1340
Maintainer: Ubuntu Core Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Architecture: i386
Source: cdrdao
Version: 1:1.2.2-17
Depends: libao2 (>= 0.8.8), libart-2.0-2 (>= 2.3.18), libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.20.0), libbonobo2-0 (>= 2.15.0), libbonoboui2-0 (>= 2.15.1), libc6 (>= 2.7), libcairo2 (>= 1.2.4), libcairomm-1.0-1 (>= 1.6.4), libfontconfig1 (>= 2.4.0), libfreetype6 (>= 2.3.5), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1), libgconf2-4 (>= 2.13.5), libgconfmm-2.6-1c2 (>= 2.22.0), libglade2-0 (>= 1:2.6.1), libglademm-2.4-1c2a (>= 2.6.0), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.12.0), libglibmm-2.4-1c2a (>= 2.18.0), libgnome-vfsmm-2.6-1c2a (>= 2.22.0), libgnome2-0 (>= 2.17.3), libgnomecanvas2-0 (>= 2.11.1), libgnomecanvasmm-2.6-1c2a (>= 2.14.0), libgnomemm-2.6-1c2 (>= 2.16.0), libgnomeui-0 (>= 2.22.0), libgnomeuimm-2.6-1c2a (>= 2.16.0), libgnomevfs2-0 (>= 1:2.17.90), libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.14.1), libgtkmm-2.4-1c2a (>= 1:2.13.8), libice6 (>= 1:1.0.0), libogg0 (>= 1.0rc3), liborbit2 (>= 1:2.14.10), libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.21.6), libpangomm-1.4-1 (>= 2.14.0), libpopt0 (>= 1.14), libsigc++-2.0-0c2a (>= 2.0.2), libsm6, libstdc++6 (>= 4.2.1), libvorbis0a (>= 1.1.2), libvorbisfile3 (>= 1.1.2), libxml2 (>= 2.6.27), zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4), cdrdao (= 1:1.2.2-17)

[stg]

Wow, /var/lib/dpkg/status is one big file! I search for MergeList in it and get no hits. Sorry I'm such a noob, I'm kind of lost now.

[mac9416]

stg,

Try this:

$ sudo cp /var/lib/dpkg/status /var/lib/dpkg/status.1
$ sudo cp /var/lib/dpkg/status-old /var/lib/dpkg/status

[stg]

thanks mac9416 that seems to have got it for now, wonder why the file corrupted?

how old would the backup have been?

[mac9416]

I really have no idea. You can run this command to see the difference between the backup and the "regular" status file:

$ diff /var/lib/dpkg/status-old /var/lib/dpkg/status.1