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When trying to run sudo apt-get upgrade my computer returns an error that I am not sure how to fix. I tried to uninstall Wine a short while back, but clearly things did not go as intended. I had previously installed PlayOnLinux, but I never got anything to work on it. Can anyone make heads or tails of this problem?

$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  intel-linux-graphics-installer libopenscenegraph80
The following packages will be upgraded:
  activity-log-manager-common activity-log-manager-control-center apport apport-gtk  bamfdaemon command-not-found command-not-found-data
  gir1.2-dbusmenu-glib-0.4 gir1.2-dbusmenu-gtk-0.4 gnome-control-center-unity gnome-screenshot google-chrome-stable libbamf3-1
  libdbusmenu-glib4 libdbusmenu-gtk3-4 libdbusmenu-gtk4 libdvdnav4 libplymouth2 libunity-2d-private0 libunity-core-6.0-5 libwhoopsie0
  lsb-base lsb-release passwd plymouth plymouth-label plymouth-theme-ubuntu-logo plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text python-apport
  python-problem-report python3-apport python3-commandnotfound python3-problem-report unity unity-2d unity-2d-common unity-2d-panel
  unity-2d-shell unity-2d-spread unity-common unity-lens-applications unity-services whoopsie
43 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/47.4 MB of archives.
After this operation, 3,360 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
dpkg: parse error, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 4794 package 'wine1.6-i386':
 `Depends' field, invalid package name `wine1.6:any': character `:' not allowed (only letters, digits and characters `-+._')
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
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  • 1
    That's interesting as a search for Wine, doesn't list version 1.6 (using apt-cache search wine). You could you remove playonlinux to see if that fixes the issue? (something like sudo apt-get remove playonlinux)
    – Mordoc
    Aug 25, 2013 at 21:38
  • I suppose I could post the terminal results. I shouldn't, the error is exactly the same as shown above. In fact, the same error returns whenever I try to remove or install anything.
    – Aleks
    Aug 26, 2013 at 0:13

1 Answer 1

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It looks like that wine package had an invalid format, but dpkg didn't catch it at installation time and wrote some information to the package database that it isn't able to read back now.

Edit the file /var/lib/dpkg/status in a text editor:

sudoedit /var/lib/dpkg/status

Go to line 4794 and change Package: wine1.6:any to Package: wine1.6

Check the directory /var/lib/dpkg/info for files whose name begins with wine1.6:any. If there are any, rename them to remove the :any part. Then dpkg should be happy and you should be able to remove the wine1.6 package.

If there are other packages with that spurious :any, do the same for them. If :any occurs in dependency lines (Depends: … wine1.6:any … or Recommends: … or Suggests: … or Conflicts: …), remove it there too.

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