adampatch
April 30th, 2011, 10:07 AM
I was mid-upgrade from meercat to natty when my web connection failed. The update manager was in the process of updating the sources lists. I restarted update manager and got this error:
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:
'E:Encountered a section with no Package: header, E:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/fr.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty_main_bina ry-i386_Packages, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.'
I get the same error on running software center and when i try using apt-get directly i get
E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/fr.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty_main_bina ry-i386_Packages
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
I tried copying status-old to status in /var/lib/dpkg but that changed nothing.
And that's as far as i've got. It seems fairly clear to me what the problem is but i'm far too much of a casual user to be able to fix it. Presumably i need to sort out my software sources list but i've only ever edited this through the software-center and since this crashes on startup (with the above error message) i'm now stuck.
Any help would be much appreciated
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:
'E:Encountered a section with no Package: header, E:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/fr.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty_main_bina ry-i386_Packages, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.'
I get the same error on running software center and when i try using apt-get directly i get
E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/fr.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty_main_bina ry-i386_Packages
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
I tried copying status-old to status in /var/lib/dpkg but that changed nothing.
And that's as far as i've got. It seems fairly clear to me what the problem is but i'm far too much of a casual user to be able to fix it. Presumably i need to sort out my software sources list but i've only ever edited this through the software-center and since this crashes on startup (with the above error message) i'm now stuck.
Any help would be much appreciated