What is the meaning of this?
I just upgraded from debian etch (where it worked just fine) to the latest ubuntu which I think is 8.04.

sam@orangeblanket:~$ sudo dpkg -i Desktop/opera_9.27-20080331.6-shared-qt_en_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 161789 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking opera (from .../opera_9.27-20080331.6-shared-qt_en_i386.deb) ...
dpkg-deb (subprocess): short read in buffer_copy (failed to write to pipe in copy)
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste returned error exit status 2
dpkg: error processing Desktop/opera_9.27-20080331.6-shared-qt_en_i386.deb (--install):
short read in buffer_copy (backend dpkg-deb during `./usr/lib/opera/9.27-20080331.6/opera')
Errors were encountered while processing:
Desktop/opera_9.27-20080331.6-shared-qt_en_i386.deb

I've seen this error for a number of other packages and answers ranging from

check the ar / tar file to make sure it's okay

to

is the deb corrupted or truncated, but it seems to happen a lot and has a bug assigned to it (Bug#158999)

The only thing I've seen work (occassionally, since it's from the unstable version) is to upgrade to dpkg 1.10.5

If you already have that version of dpkg, I'm at a loss myself.

Best of luck,

Mike