It is said that over a period of time two enemies start to resemble each other. Ubuntu Linux taking on Windows 8 with Unity has started to resemble the Windows. The famous Window’s blue screen of death and black screen of death has taken avatar in Ubuntu as White Screen of Death. Continue reading
The buggy Ubuntu has become what used to be ‘Windows 95’ i.e. crashing without reason (or user stimuli) whatsoever. Rather falling under its own weight. I have already replaced Ubuntu Precise vanilla 12.04 with Linux Mint 13 on two computers. It appears that time has come for change that will be away from Ubuntu. There is nothing more annoying than working for first day after holidays and being greeted with a crash report. Today the Update Manager Crashed with following message and advice to report bug:
An unresolvable problem occurred while initializing the package information. Please report this bug against the 'update-manager' package and include the following error message: 'E:Encountered a section with no Package: header, E:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/security.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise-security_main_i18n_Translation-en, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.'
This is the error message from “apt-get update”:
Reading package lists... Error! E: Encountered a section with no Package: header E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/security.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise-security_main_i18n_Translation-en E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
Executing following command
sudo apt get install -f
merely repeated the above message.
It appears that it is a well-known bug and a persistent one. There is some mix-up in package lists. Executing following commands at Terminal deleted existing lists and resolved the problem:
sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/*
The above did give an error that it can not remove the ‘partial’ as it is directory. But we ignored it and updated the system manually from the terminal with following command:
sudo apt-get update
The update took longer but it resolved the problem for now. Thus started the New Year 2013.
© Sandeep Bhalla
IPC Error Message in substance means inability to contact IPC Server. In actual practice it can be anything which includes inability to find sync data for some reason.
One hard disk broke down. Well almost. It was an old disk and was often suspected to be slow hence I had backed up entire home folder to a different drive about a week back. This old disk had Linux Mint installed on it. On new disk I had Ubuntu Precise Pangolin 12.04 installed with the same /home partition (old backed up from broken drive to new drive). Now as usual we installed cinnamon and removed Unity. Thereafter when I tried to sync with Ubuntu Cloud, it would start but crash with smallest possible message:
"IPCError"
Now searching the net offered many solutions. Continue reading
To install image converter in Nautilus, the native file browser for Ubuntu Precise Pangolin 12.04; Open Terminal (Control+Alt+T) and type:
sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter
Enter password and choose ‘Yes’. It is done.
Above shall install an image size converter in Nautilus. Now clicking the context menu shall display an option to re-size an image, clicking upon which shall call an application widow with options for re-sizing the image and to save the new image separately.
BTW the above command works for the Linux Mint 13 as well; even though its browser is Caja. No need to change ‘nautilus’ to ‘caja’ in above command. It works fine as it is.
© Sandeep Bhalla
Sandeep Bhalla's Blog 