[PLUG] Ubuntu 12.04 software updates hung

Dick Steffens dick at dicksteffens.com
Tue Jan 14 00:17:24 UTC 2014


I bought a brand used Lenovo M58P and installed Ubuntu 12.04 on it. I 
finished adding stuff I use via the Ubuntu Software Center, Synaptic, 
and/or apt-get install. I moved on adding the footpedal program for 
which I have a .deb. That process hung. Now I can't do anything with any 
of those three tools. When I try I get an error message that says:

E: The package footpedal needs to be reinstalled, but I can't find an 
archive for it.
E: Internal error opening cache(1). Please report.

As soon as I acknowledge that error Synaptic closes (similar results 
with Ubuntu Software Center and apt-get).

In order to get the correct wording of that error message I ran synaptic 
from the command line. Once it closed I could see the following:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/sbin/update-apt-xapian-index", line 106, in <module>
     indexer.incrementalUpdate()
   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/axi/indexer.py", line 683, in 
incrementalUpdate
     self.updateIndex(dbpath)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/axi/indexer.py", line 643, in 
incrementalUpdate
     cache = self.aptcache()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/axi/indexer.py", line 418, in 
incrementalUpdate
     self.apt_cache = apt.Cache(memonly=True, progress=aptprogress)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 102, in __init__
     self.open(progress)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 146, in open
     self.depcache = apt_pkg.DepCache(self.cache)
SystemError: E: The package footpedal needs to be reinstalled, but I 
can't find an archive for it.
user at machine:~$

Now the mouse and keyboard are unresponsive. <ctrl><alt><F1> has no effect.

I assume I'll have to power down and back up to get back in, but where 
do I start to clean this up?

Thanks.

-- 
Regards,

Richard C. Steffens




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