Hi Michele, Thanks very much for the hint. Unfortunately, when I ran apt-get update, it comes up with the following (I'm paraphrasing)... ***** Reading package lists... Error! W: GPG error: ppa.launchpad.net The following signatures were invalid... BADSIG ... Launchpad PPA for Daniel Richter E: Encountered a section with no Package: header E: Problem with mergelist ... ***** So, with a bit of searching, I found this web page ... http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1978554 ... then followed these instructions ... sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf sudo apt-get update ... and got an error-free result. Now both Software Manager and Synaptic start up OK. However: I'm pretty sure the only thing I use from Daniel Richter is grub-customizer. And that program appears as installed in both Software Manager and Synaptic. Just wondering, if anyone knows, whether any updates for my grub-customizer will continue to be detected and installed in the future? Or is it now "orphaned"... in an updating sense of the word? Carl On 11/06/15 23:53, Michele Bert wrote:
2015-06-11 15:18 GMT+02:00 Carl Turney <carl@boms.com.au>:
Starting Synaptic only gives the following error messages (and Synaptic won't run): *****
An error occurred The following details are provided:
E: Encountered a section with no Package: header E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/ppa.launchpad.net_danielrichter2007_grub-customizer_ubuntu_dists_trusty_main_i18n_Translation-en E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. E: _cache->open() failed, please report.
*****
t looks like the package list is corrupted. Try to update it from command line:
sudo apt-get update