I was just wondering if anyone has had some experience with this error?

I ran the update manager this evening on a fresh install of 8.10, and it appeared to hang for a fair while when restarting, so i hit the reset button. I'm going to assume it's pretty bad. But any help would be much appreciated.

The update manager now says that there's 301 new updates, and when i tell it to install all updates, it gets this error:

dpkg: parse error, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 1:
field name '
dpkg: parse error, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 1:
field name '
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
A package failed to install. Trying to recover: