Ubuntu – Fixing software center catalog

Sometimes a corrupt installation package can corrupt your package management system leaving your Linux unable to install or on remove any packages (Software). Here is the message error I got from apt-get after trying to install ndas-admin for Ubuntu.

$sudo apt-get install mplayer (or any package) Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done E: The package ndas-admin needs to be reinstalled, but I can’t find an archive for it. (this is the error)

I tried : $ sudo apt-get install -f , to try to fix the problem but got the same error. The only option I had was to edit the dpkg status file manually.

$ sudo gedit /var/lib/dpkg/status    (if you prefer you can use vi instead of gedit)
Locate the corrupt package, and remove the whole block of information about it and save the file. Mine looked like this:

Package: ndas-admin
Status: deinstall reinstreq half-configured
Priority: extra
Section: alien
Installed-Size: 100
Maintainer: root <root@ubuntu510>
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.0.2-24
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.4-1)
Description: Administration toosl for XIMETA,Inc NDAS device driver for Linux operating system
 ndas-admin – This program allows the user to register/enable/disable/unregister the XIMETA NDAS hard disk.
 .
 (Converted from a rpm package by alien version 8.53.)

Fixed. Hope this helps someone else.

You will need a terminal to solve the situation, the Software Center isn't able to handle this kind of problems. To do this use:

sudo dpkg -r linux-generic linux-image-generic
sudo apt-get install linux-generic

That should solve the problem.