serious problems, unsure of the cause

[daniel.cotter]

Ubuntu 12.04:

Today when I logged in, I found a "Do Not Enter" symbol on the taskbar with the following message when clicked:

An error occurred, please run Package Manager from the right-click menu or apt-get in a terminal to see what is wrong.  
The Error message was: 'Error: Opening the cache (E:Encountered a section with no Package: header, E:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/
archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_universe_binary-amd64_Packages, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened)'.
This usually means that your installed packages have unmet dependencies

Below those words are links to Show updates, Install all Updates and Check for Updates. Clicking Show Updates, it opens a dialog box saying:

Could not initialize the package information.
An unresolvable problem occurred while initializing the package information.

Please report this bug against the "update-manager" package and include the following error message: (then it repeats the same message seen in parenthesis in  the error noted above)

Clicking on Install all updates, from that same error dialog, I get an error message from backend_helper.py, saying:

Failed to load the package list.  This is a serious problem. Try again later. If this problem appears again, please report an error to the developers,  Details reveal the same error message again as noted in the first box

Clicking Check for Updates produces a dialog box containing this error:

Invalid Problem Report
Could not determine the package or source package name

Trying to open synaptic, to see if a recent update (yesterday) may be the cause, the same or very similar error is given and it crashes.

I updated the linux header files presented by the update manager yesterday, but restarted afterward with no immediate occurrence of this error.

Probably also related is that I cannot open the Software Center, it just crashes.

Any suggestions where to start poking around?

Thanks

[Bashing-om]

daniel.cotter; Hi !

Before the poking around stage, I suggest you clean the system up. Here is oldfred's methology: From the terminal and in order given:
#houseclean

 sudo apt-get autoclean # only removes files that cannot be downloaded anymore (obsolete)
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get clean

#refresh

 sudo apt-get update #resync package index
sudo apt-get upgrade #newest versions of all packages, update must be run first
#would upgrade you to the latest kernel in the repositories
#dist-upgrade is also able to remove existing packages if required/and install held back packages,
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo dpkg --configure -a
All that does is update it again.

After all that is done, see what errors are generated (none ?)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

just try'n to help <== BDQ

[daniel.cotter]

Just looked into this and found your reply (thank you)

Here is the output of the first command:

daniel@daniel-Pangolin:~$ sudo apt-get autoclean
[sudo] password for daniel: 
Reading package lists... Error!
E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_universe_binary-amd64_Packages
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
daniel@daniel-Pangolin:~$

[daniel.cotter]

When all these cleanup utilities were failing, I searched the Internet for other answers, and found a very simple solution that has already been worked out:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/30072...o-do-an-update.

So thank you for reading this, and thanks a bunch, Bashing-om, for your suggestions.

Daniel

[Bashing-om]

Hey, not a problem, We are all in this together !

Please mark this thread as solved:
a) aides others seeking a solution -
b)saves us helpers time NOT looking at a resolved situation.

happy ubuntu'n < == BDQ