[ALUG] Ubuntu 7.04 apt-get error when installing packages

[MJ Ray]

sagr <alug1 at suffolk-ancestor-genealogy-research.co.uk> wrote:
> [...]  The question is what to do now.  My PC starts and runs ok,
> and, indeed, if I had not tried to do an apt-get I would be completely
> unaware anything is wrong.  Unfortunately this PC is rather slow
> (300MHz) with only 128MB RAM and took ages (nearly 4 hours?) to install
> Ubuntu and I have been happily typing away extensively personalising it
> since then.  I am therefore a bit reluctant to reinstall everything from
> scratch. [...]

I'd get a pen and paper and each time it complains about a missing
newline, note the PACKAGENAME and run
  echo >> /var/lib/dpkg/PACKAGENAME.list
then rinse and repeat.  Once apt actually runs, I'd reinstall all the
packages you've noted.

It would be better to do a full reinstall, but I hate doing that too.
If Ubuntu sometimes breaks itself, I'd expect someone to have
documented the recovery process, but I can't find it across their 1001
unconnected web sites.

I don't know what Ubuntu's current minimum and recommended specs are,
especially with the lardballs of today's Gnome, OpenOffice.org and
Mozilla, but I would have expected that PC to be quite OK for running
Linux, if a little slowly sometimes.

[...]
> Alternatively I still have the Ubuntu 7.04 "Live CD" from which I
> originally installed Ubuntu... can I simply copy any files off there
> onto my hard disk to correct the problem?

Depends if it has matching files in a /var/lib/dpkg, or you could try
sudo dpkg -i /path/to/xcalc*.deb if you can find the deb packages on
the CD and see if dpkg is happy to do that.

Good luck!
-- 
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