Hello there,

I think I screwed up my debian sarge on my laptop somehow - trying to install *anything* via apt-get results in:

(BTW, it is always smbfs - I recently tried even a dist-upgrade, guess what happened after retriefing MBs of data?)

I did a
and it keeps telling me that
for *everything* I tried to apt-get install (initially I tried to add sudo I somehow forgot in the base install).

Does anyone have a clue what this might be? As far as I can read, it seems to be the contents of the newly apt-got smbfs deb Package, so if I edit that, it will be messed again every time I apt-get update it.

Any help very much appreciated, I am desperate !

Yours, Peter

Well, with a big help from #debian at freenode, I found the solution (thanks justin!!):

the file /var/lib/dpkg/info/smbfs.list was corrupted, it was all binary crap. Dunno how this could happen, but it was. So justin advised me to delete the file (actually, I mv'd it) - and, voila, apt warned me that the files list could not be found for smbfs, but at least I could apt-get remove smbfs --purge and install it again (apt-get install smbfs) - that took the biscuit!

So big cheers to justin!

If someone with a similar problem comes across this therad, I wanted to give the solution here. It was rather easy to imagine, but I could not figure out where the file might reside, so I hope this may guide another desperate linuxer to get his dpkg work again.

Cheers,

Peter

Give the man a prize. Just solved my issue by sharing that little bit. Not a newbie either just never seen this error before and well googling around i found your post and now i am back to getting stuff done thanks to Justin AND Peter.

Thanks guy
Tnt

Had the same problem with a fresh Debian install. I got the error saying

Sure enough, /var/lib/dpkg/info/gcc-4.3.list had a whole bunch of garbage in it. I deleted it, then did

and now everything's ok again.

Thanks for posting your solutions!

Yeah, that reinstall command is important. I started by just deleting the corrupt list files and then started getting "serious warnings" from apt-get.

reinstalling those packages fixed everything for me.

hi
i tried all the above methods but ....
here is the error which i get when i try to install or remove any package

Debian for already 2 years - give or take a few months - strongly recommends to use "aptitude" as the preferred sole method of maintaining packages, updating or upgrading.

Why, amongst a large bunch of other users, don't you stick to this? But try and try and try all other kinds of methods till your/their system is corrupt and sticks in the mud.

No, no excuse for the pure CLI-freaks is there! Aptitude runs also perfectly outside any GUI.

Good luck from now on.

Please have a look at this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-5dpkg-788082/

Evo2.

hi
i'm new in linux . i've installed knoppix linux version 6.2.1 in my system that has has a graphical interface (compize) . i want to install gnome in my system cuz it has not any X login screen and i tried to do debian guide to do that but i get dpkg error in my system .so i decided to do apt-get -f upgrade to upgrade my system but after downloading 1.5 GB file again i received dpkg erro and it's says use "apt-get -f install" to correct this problem . unfortunately when i want to do it too i get this problem again :
(Reading database ... 40%
dpkg: warning: files list file for package `cloop-utils' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
(Reading database ... 70%
dpkg: warning: files list file for package `dpkg' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
(Reading database ... 407694 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libkrb53 (from .../libkrb53_1.6.dfsg.4~beta1-5lenny6_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libkrb53_1.6.dfsg.4~beta1-5lenny6_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/lib/libkrb5.so.3.3', which is also in package libkrb5-3 0:1.8+dfsg~alpha1-5
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/libkrb53_1.6.dfsg.4~beta1-5lenny6_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

is anybody know what should i do to get deal with this problem
before thanks for your response

thank you guys!! (specially Justin and Peter)
Was stuck in this problem for around 8 months!!

@PBSchmidt - awesome, thanks for posting your fix.

I had the problem with libusb, I've just removed the package files and reinstalled it (perhaps could have just reinstalled it actually) with apt-get --reinstall install libusb-0.x.x.

Many thanks to @PBSchmidt. I assumed the file deletion will be sufficient (with reinstall, off course) but for nothing could find the correct path to it .

@PBSchmidt kudos, it turns out it was also a corrupted `.list` file in my case.

Same problem here in 2023 using Proxmox, but here with "bc" and "libencode-locale-perl" packages. And, as said before, the .list file from both packages looked corrupted.

So I've changed both from .list to .list2 and run 'apt update' and 'apt upgrade'.

It has worked like magic!

Thank you all!