Two (possibly) unrelated problems

[Guest]

I just upgraded to 8.10 from 8.04 (kubuntu) about a week ago, and have encountered a couple of problems:

1) Whenever I go to open an archive (of any type) with Ark, it simply crashes. When I tell the KDE crash handler to show me the details, I get this message: "Unable to create a valid backtrace. This backtrace appears to be of no use. This is probably because your packages are built in a way which prevents the creation of proper backtraces, or the stack frame was seriously corrupted in the crash."

So I decided to try checking for an upgrade to Ark and seeing if that solved the problem. Sure enough, there was an upgrade available, so I set about installing it. I decided to do it through terminal using the following command: "sudo apt-get upgrade ark-kde4". Which leads me to problem #2.

2) After downloading all of the packages it was going to upgrade, I got the following output from the upgrade process:

"Preconfiguring packages ...
dpkg: parse error, in file `/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 4551 package `wamerican':
newline in field name `
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)"

I get the EXACT same error trying to upgrade from the Adept installer in KDE4.1 as well, so this leaves me with a problem. I can't open archives, and I can't upgrade ANY packages at all. Anyone have any thoughts or solutions to this?

Thanks.

[toad]

Re: Two (possibly) unrelated problems

Just a suggestion for the second problem. I'd uninstall wamerican

sudo apt-get remove purge wamerican

Here is the what would have happened on my system:

sudo apt-get remove -s wamerican
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
language-support-en language-support-writing-en wamerican
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Remv language-support-en [1:8.10+20080703]
Remv language-support-writing-en [1:8.10+20080904]
Remv wamerican [6-2.2]

Then reinstall all packages previously removed.

[Rog131]

Re: Two (possibly) unrelated problems

With the error message: "dpkg: parse error, in file `/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line" i can find (google finds):

> Question #10265 dpkg: parse error, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/available'
> Ubuntu Forums: dpkg: parse error, in file `/var/lib/dpkg/available'
> ...

[toad]

Re: Two (possibly) unrelated problems

Nice on Rog,

sudo dpkg --clear-avail && sudo apt-get update

appears to be the way to go.

[Guest]

Re: Two (possibly) unrelated problems

Just wanted to say thanks to you guys not only for the easy fix, but for how quickly I got responses. I'm very grateful to you! Never in a million years did I think that posting would get me the solution within an hour or so, but perhaps I should have.

For the records, the following cleared up the Adept problem just fine:

sudo dpkg --clear-avail && sudo apt-get update

And, of course, upgrading Ark fixed my archive problem like I originally thought it might.

Thanks again!