[Bug 370294] Re: Problem with MergeList, The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened

Wed Oct 3 13:12:33 UTC 2012

*** This bug is a duplicate of bug 346386 ***
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/346386

Just run the following command in a terminal;

            sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

and then;

            sudo apt-get update

This will solve your problem.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/370294

Title:
  Problem with MergeList, The package lists or status file could not be
  parsed or opened

Status in “update-manager” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: update-manager

  I know that looks like all the other similarly reported bugs, but
  after reading those they did not seem to have the same root cause as
  this one.

  I am running Ubuntu 9.04, recently upgraded. And since have had this problem a few times.
  The full error is as follows.
  # apt-get update
  Get:1 http://security.ubuntu.com jaunty-security Release.gpg [189B]
  Ign http://security.ubuntu.com jaunty-security/main Translation-en_US
  .. all these go ok, just removed them to shorten it a bit ...
  Hit http://security.ubuntu.com jaunty-security/multiverse Packages
  Fetched 174kB in 0s (469kB/s)
  Reading package lists... Error!
  E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
  E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_jaunty_universe_binary-i386_Packages
  E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

  Now the reason why it fails is pretty simple. The content of said file
  is filled with the default HTML page my router returns when it has
  been down and the local network is up, but the internet connection
  isn't up yet.

  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
  <html>
  <head>
    <title>SpeedTouch</title>
  .. snip .. 

  Now I would expect apt-get to actually verify if the file it downloads is actually something it can do something with.

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