Ubuntu – Settings menu in Ubuntu 17.10 is obliterated

17.10dpkggnome-control-centersettings

I have no way of accessing any of my settings on my fresh install of Ubuntu 17.10. I installed 15 minutes ago, added a few core packages, one of which was wine where dpkg failed and I had to restart it. And it keeps telling me randomly that an install failed of : libsane1 (experimental).

After I installed those packages, no settings available. The menus are gone, their icons are gone, they won't load even if they have an icon.

As soon as I got the first error message from dpkg, I did a

sudo apt-get remove libsane1

which went perfectly well and appeared to clear up the error. Then back and did a

sudo apt-get install libsane1

which also went perfectly fine and no problems seemed to exist.

Only during the installation of wine-hq-staging on my fresh and clean ubuntu does the error appear. Well it also appears on winehq-stable too but I did not use that this occasion.

Best Answer

First check whether Settings (aka gnome-control-center) is installed. You may run

apt-cache policy gnome-control-center

If the output contains Installed: (none) install gnome-control-center by running

sudo apt install gnome-control-center

Otherwise this package may be corrupted. In that case purge gnome-control-center first and reinstall again.

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Ubuntu – Ubuntu 16.04 broken kernel packages won’t let me install or remove anything with apt-get

Note: As ChaiT.Rex commented below, only steps 4 & 5 are required to fix the problem.

I leave steps 1,2&3 documented for anyone who may need to manually remove some packages. But try first this https://askubuntu.com/a/490677/26246 which looks easier.

Remove them manually, be careful if you are retyping the below commands rm -rf is a dangerous command when it's run as root.

sudo rm -rf /lib/modules/4.4.0-38-generic /lib/modules/4.4.0-42-generic
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/doc/linux-image-extra-4.4.0-38-generic /usr/share/doc/linux-image-extra-4.4.0-42-generic
sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-extra-4.4.0-38-generic* /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-extra-4.4.0-42-generic*

Change their status in dpkg status file.

Make backup just in case

sudo cp /var/lib/dpkg/status /var/lib/dpkg/status.backup0

Find the related entries (command with expected output, line number will be different):

~$ grep -n -e "linux-image-extra-4.4.0-38-generic" -e "linux-image-extra-4.4.0-42-generic" /var/lib/dpkg/status
18488:Package: linux-image-extra-4.4.0-42-generic
77123:Package: linux-image-extra-4.4.0-38-generic

Open status file for edit and change the package status:

sudo nano +18488 /var/lib/dpkg/status

from:

Package: linux-image-extra-4.4.0-38-generic
Status: install ok installed

to:

Package: linux-image-extra-4.4.0-38-generic
Status: deinstall ok config-files

Ctrl+o to save. Ctrl+x to exit.

Make same changes to linux-image-extra-4.4.0-42-generic .

Manually remove linux-image-4.4.0-38-generic & linux-image-4.4.0-42-generic too

sudo rm -f *4.4.0-38-generic *4.4.0-42-generic
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/doc/linux-image-4.4.0-38-generic /usr/share/doc/linux-image-4.4.0-42-generic

Same as before edit their status to deinstall ok config-files

$ grep -n -e "Package: linux-image-4.4.0-38-generic" -e "Package: linux-image-4.4.0-42-generic" /var/lib/dpkg/status
61217:Package: linux-image-4.4.0-38-generic
98051:Package: linux-image-4.4.0-42-generic

Remove that troublesome virtualbox file
```
sudo rm /etc/kernel/postinst.d/vboxadd
```

Update dpkg status & grub menu

sudo dpkg --audit
sudo apt-get install -f
sudo update-grub

Ubuntu – The Package System is Broken after Upgraded to Ubuntu 17.04

I think I found a solution, but a big caveat though: it works, but I can’t explain why.

First, I went to /var/lib/dpkg/info/:

cd /var/lib/dpkg/info/

Then, I removed the lines pertaining to the packages which caused the problems. In my case, I had to do:

sudo rm -r python3-apparmor-click.*
sudo rm -r click-apparmor.*
sudo rm -r click.*
sudo rm -r ubuntu-app-launch.* 
sudo rm -r url-dispatcher-tools.*
sudo rm -r url-dispatcher:amd64.*
sudo rm -r libunity-scopes1.0:amd64

After that, I typed:

sudo apt purge python3-apparmor-click
sudo apt purge click-apparmor    
sudo apt purge click
sudo apt purge ubuntu-app-launch
sudo apt purge url-dispatcher-tools
sudo apt purge url-dispatcher:amd64
sudo apt purge libunity-scopes1.0

After that,

sudo apt update

And finally,

sudo apt dist-upgrade

which worked and updated my packages. All the packages problems seem to have disappeared.

Best Answer

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