I was installing Dropbox when, for some reason, the process got stuck. Synaptic (and apt-get) stopped working after that. I tried some hacks I found on the net and ended up deleting
/var/lib/dpkg/lock .
This only worsened my troubles. Running
dpkg --configure -a
gives me the error -
dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
When opening synaptic:
E: Could not open file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - open (2: No such file or directory)
E: _cache->open() failed, please report.