I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 a couple of times by now. I first install Ubuntu 11.04, then load the packages and finally upgrade to 11.10. It’s a long shot but then it works every time anyway, recently I tried the same procedure on a friends laptop, everything was fine, except when I wanted to upgrade. (Oh, by the way I load the upgrade files on a bootable pen drive). The Synaptic Package Manager showed an error which was something like – “E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/
download.learnfree.eu_repository_skss_Packages”.
Now I am just a beginner with ubuntu and solutions to problems don’t really “click” instantly for me. So obviously I dug the net. The logic of solving the problem was actually pretty simple but it took a lot of time to comprehend. You see while installing Ubuntu 11.04 a few packages were only partially installed, to solve that you need to remove the packages/directories and create new ones again. Now there are two ways to do this I suppose.
1. Type these in your terminal
sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf
sudo apt-get update
This however didn’t work for me, maybe because of the net connection.
2. The following commands worked like a charm
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists
sudo mkdir /var/lib/apt/lists
sudo mkdir /var/lib/apt/lists/partial
So after executing this when I started my synaptic manager again, it gave a
different error “broken packages”. The solution to that is simple: Edit->Fix
broken packages->Apply.
