Hi Jason, I'm not at my machine at the present, but I'll suggest two ways of fixing this.
1. EASY Hold down Alt and press the F2 button. This will bring up a dialog box. Type in: gnome-terminal (you can find the same under the menu list - I can't recall exactly where at the moment) When the Terminal windows pops up, type: cp /etc/apt/sources.list /home/<your/computers'/name>/Desktop/ In my case it would be /home/patrick/Desktop This places a copy of the sources.list file on your desktop. Copy the contents of the file into a post to the group and we can all see it. If you're in the same country as someone else, they could send you a copy of their sources.list file (which we can all then see as well) and we can explain how to exchange their's for yours. See, EASY! OR 2. NOT SO EASY BUT MORE EDUCATIONAL :))) When the Terminal windows pops up. Type: cd /etc/apt/ This will mean you are moving to the file (folder in windows terms) directory (cd = change directory) called 'apt'. Typing: ls (lower case L and S) will list everything in the directory. Here you will find the sources.list your error discusses. This file lists all the repositories for various software packages. We need to make a copy of the original so we can work on the file BUT keep a back up :)) As the file is within the root filing system, you need to be root to edit the file. So do this first: sudo cp sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.orig This will create a copy of the file and rename it source.list.orig If we 'bork' the now 'real' file, we can always replace it with the .orig file - this is ALWAYS a good practice when fiddling with files and especially when fiddling with files in the root system. Then do the following: sudo gedit sources.list This means you are requesting root access (sudo) to open the text editor (gedit) and asking gedit to open the sources.list file NOTE: sudo in Ubuntu this is more like a 'fake root password' but we don't really need to go in to this here. You will be asked to put in the root password and then Gedit will open with all the sources listed. As you scroll down the list you will see that there is a number at the bottom showing you which line you are on. You'll need to find line 56 (as mentioned in the error message). If you can post that, we can then see what is causing the problem and work out a solution. Most likely it will require some minor editing to the details in the file. This is not as hard as it sounds as this is merely a text file and very easy to change. Regards, Patrick On 30/12/2008, JasonB <[email protected]> wrote: I am new, but I think I have done this all correctly. This is a partition install on a Win Vista system, HP laptop. Everything boots fine, but I get the following error when trying to access any package manager menu: Could not initialize the package information A unresolvable problem occurred while initializing the package information. Please report this bug against the 'update-manager' package and include the following error message: 'E:Malformed line 56 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list (dist parse), E:The list of sources could not be read.' Then, if I try to access it by right clicking the upper right icon, I get the following: E: Malformed line 56 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list (dist parse) E: The list of sources could not be read. Go to the repository dialog to correct the problem. E: _cache->open() failed, please report. Can someone help me past this step so I can get to the updates, and figure out my next step in getting wifi to work. Thanks a TON! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gOS Linux" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/goslinux?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
