Today i got a segfault from aptitude on Ubuntu 8.10. This is caused by corrupted files in /var/cache/apt/ and is usually caused by bad hardware like harddrives and such, I discovered a bad memory module when I ran memtest.
The corrupted file in /var/cache/apt stops you from updating and installing packages, which isn’t very nice now is it? Here’s a fix for you:
run this in a terminal
sudo rm /var/cache/apt/*.bin && sudo aptitude update
Then I would suggest you run memtest86+ and check for memory errors to be on the safe side.
Thanks to Dean Lee for solving this and the guys and girls at ubuntuforums too.
