Fixing an ubuntu system that won’t perform package operations

The most common cause of this problem that I have found is that a package was either broken or interrupted during the configuration phase and the package manager will not do anything until the configuration has been completed. This happens a lot of times when the package wants user input during the configuration, unfortunately most of the graphical package managers assume this doesn’t happen and never present the question to the end user to answer.

To resolve this, run the following command from a shell window. This will re-run any uncompleted configurations and any user input can be entered.:

dpkg –configure -a