sagr alug1@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!