Error message when starting Package Manager

Asked by Bruce McCormick

On the Panel, I have a red circle symbol with a white line through it.

If I hover over it, it displays the message:

“An error occurred, please run Package Manager from the right-click menu or apt-get in a terminal to see what's wrong. The error message was:'Error:Opening the cache (E:Encountered a sction with no Package: header, e:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/extras.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty_main_binary-i386_Packages, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.)'. This usually means that your installed packages have unmet dependencies” [End of message}

If I right click on it and then click on “Show Updates”, I get the following message:

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/extras.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty_main_binary-i386_Packages, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.' [End of message]

If I right click on it and then click “Start Package Manager”, it starts loading the Package Manager, then I get,

“An error occurred

The following details are provided:

E: Encountered a section with no Package: header

E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/extras.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty_main_binary-i386_Packages

E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

E: _cache->open() failed, please report.

[End of message]

From the About menu:

You are using Ubuntu 11.04 - the Natty Narwhal - released in April 2011 and supported until October 2012.

I just recently installed 11.04 and this has been happening ever since.

Contact info: Bruce McCormick, <email address hidden>

Question information

Language:
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Status:
Solved
For:
Ubuntu software-center Edit question
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Solved by:
Bruce McCormick
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Revision history for this message
mycae (mycae) said :
#1

can you run this command from a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T to launch terminal) , and see if this fixes your problem? You can cut and paste the command.

sudo mv /var/lib/apt/lists/extras.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty_main_binary-i386_Packages ~/extras.backup
sudo apt-get update

Revision history for this message
Mark Rijckenberg (markrijckenberg) said :
#2
Revision history for this message
Bruce McCormick (brucem) said :
#3

For no particular reason I started with the last procedure first (the one from Mark Rijckenberg) and that seems to have fixed the problem, but thank you all for your quick response.

Revision history for this message
Abdul (kh66) said :
#4

Hi Bruce
I too have the same problem.Could any one guide me to solve this issue?Regards Abdul

Revision history for this message
twoflatfish (twoflatfish) said :
#5

The problem appears to be in the 'Sources List"
See:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+question/161960

I removed the Ultimate Edition Repository in my "Other Sources" list which appears to be the problem in my case.