Running into trouble with Synaptic and other things

can you give the output of:

head -n 54 /etc/apt/sources.list | tail -n 1

Thanks

bbanzai@little-sparky:~$ head -n 54 /etc/apt/sources.list | tail -n 1
deb http://archive.canonical.com/lucid partner
bbanzai@little-sparky:~$

That's pretty much it.

If you click on the blue above " http://archive.canonical.com/lucid" it says that the link is dead. If you google it, it seems to refer to Sun-Java.

I would kill the line just not by putting at the front of it: #
so that it reads: # deb http://archive.canonical.com/lucid partner

(You can edit your sources list by opening a Terminal and issuing the command: gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list)

Have you installed ubuntu-restricted-extras, which will install. among other things, Sun-Java?

The line should be:

deb http://archive.canonical.com lucid partner

You seem to have added a slash...

arochester: You seem to misunderstand. I'm not entering that line, that's what the system gives me once I enter in the "head" command actionparsnip suggested. However, you are correct in that all this came about because I've been trying to install the most recent update of Java. And I started getting the error message I mentioned in the original post. I appreciate your input, but I don't know that it is applicable to my case, so I'll wait to employ it.

actionparsnip: Okay, I didn't add a slash. You asked me to give the output of your command, and I just copy/pasted the result. Let me try it again.

Okay, I copy your requested command, and paste it into the command line. Then it spits out the one line, and gives me a new command prompt. The one line, copied again from my recent attempt, is this one:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/lucid partner

I didn't add anything. If there's an extra slash, that's what my computer is giving me. Is this what is making my system give me that error command?

Also: I just encountered an error flag dealing with exactly that error message when the Update Manager attempted to start. It says "E: Malformed line 54 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list (dist parse), E: the list of sources could not be read." The little warning in the corner includes the message "This usually means that your installed packages have unmet dependencies."

Does this add anything useful? If my update manager is jamming as well, then I'd like to get this straightened out. Because, don't I need the update manager?

Seriously, if there's an extra slash in there that's not supposed to be, I want to take it out. But I have no idea what to enter to do that, to correct the issue. I don't even really know how it got in there. I just need a step-by-step to get things rolling again.

If you run:
gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

You will get write access

Okay, that works. I apparently have write access, whatever that means.

Now what?

Using the file that is open now (with write permission ie you can amend it) you replace the following line -

deb http://archive.canonical.com/lucid partner

with this line -

deb http://archive.canonical.com lucid partner

Then you carefully save (file menu) the open file and close it.

After that the 'malformed' line error should not occur.

You can check this by doing -

head -n 54 /etc/apt/sources.list | tail -n 1

again.

Hooray! Thank you, Ted C. That's exactly what I needed.

Thanks everyone! Successful fix!

Now I just have to figure out how to do what I was originally trying to do without running into this same trouble!

You, ah, might be seeing my name again on a different problem thread. :)