Apt-Get totally broken

[Piro24]

Hey all.

Today I tried updating my system, and was greeted with a rather annoying message.


E: Problem parsing dependency Conflicts
E: Error occurred while processing openoffice.org-l10n-el (NewVersion1)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_main_bin ary-i386_Packages
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
E: _cache->open() failed, please report.


Any suggestions? Running apt-get install -f didn't help btw.

[-humanaut-]

you could try dpkg --configure -a

or if all else fails It'd suggest running "sudo apt-get -f remove" instead of installing it.

[Piro24]

Hi, Thanks for your reply.

Anyway, I tried dpkg --configure -a shortly after posting here, and that didn't help either.

I tried running sudo apt-get remove -f but got basically the same error message.



patrick@patrick-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get -f remove
Reading package lists... Error!
E: Problem parsing dependency Conflicts
E: Error occurred while processing openoffice.org-l10n-el (NewVersion1)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_karmic_main_bin ary-i386_Packages
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.


I was thinking about opening up that file and simply removing any entries that have anything to do with openoffice, but I'm not sure if that would work, and it's a lot of work on top of that.

[drs305]

In Ubuntu you can often clear a "merge list" problem by refreshing the list. In synaptic (or the equivalent in other releases), untick all the repositories - remember which ones you disable. Refresh/reload the repository list, then reselect them and reload the repositories again.

[-humanaut-]

Wait that could be a bad idea. try this

dpkg --clear-selections

[Piro24]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I couldn't actually get into a package manager, it would give me the error and then quit, so I'd have to use the terminal (which I generally prefer anyway).

Anyway, the problem went away seemingly by itself after an unrelated reboot (X crashed while I was playing AssaultCube).

Regardless, thanks for the suggestions!