flashplugin-nonfree broken

[Juan R. de Silva]

On Thu, 13 May 2010 10:49:46 -0500, Christopher Biessener wrote:

> I just finished skimming through the archives...  I have not seen
> similar 10.04 upgrade issues.
> I was running 8.04 happily and wanted the new firefox and OpenOffice
> with ubuntu's blessing instead of manually installing them, so I chose
> to upgrade to the new LTS.  Everything went fine with one exception:
> 
>     my 10.0.1.218+really9.0.262.0ubuntu1 package is broken
> 
> Synaptic will not fix it, it's output from "Complete Removal" follows:
> 
>     dpkg: error processing flashplugin-nonfree (--purge):
>       Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should reinstall
>       it before attempting a removal.
>     Errors were encountered while processing:
>       flashplugin-nonfree
> 
> The "Reinstall" option is greyed out.  I cannot reinstall it.  I cannot
> remove it.  Any suggestions?

I had the same problem and resolved it following these sources:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1466583
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/429841

Read if you want to understand the problem.

To simplify it for you, here is the actual fix.

1.

rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/flashplugin-nonfree.prerm
dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq flashplugin-nonfree
dpkg --purge --force-remove-reinstreq flashplugin-nonfree

This should stop any errors related to the flashplugin-nonfree broken 
package. 

To re-install flashplugin-nonfree proceed with the step 2.

2.

- Enable medubuntu repository in Software Sources applet which was 
disabled by Lucid installer/updater.
- Reload sources.
- Find in Synaptic flashplugin-installer and install it.

Done.