Software Installation – Fix ‘DPKG Was Interrupted’ Error When Installing Applications

software installation

I have ubuntu 11.10 and when I run any package management command in terminal I get this message

E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a'
to correct the problem.

What is the problem and how can I solve it?

The error message usually points to having interrupted a download in the past.

This should be resolved by the following:

sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

I had same issue, just posting my findings to help anyone else.

I ran

sudo apt-get install gcc-4.7-multilib

And it installed the ia32-libs from here I assume, suddenly works. I needed it to run XAMPP on Ubuntu 12.10 - May help someone!

You should reinstall it, otherwise it won't get removed:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
sudo apt-get install -f

That should solve your issue.