Solution to “There seems to be a programming error in aptdaemon”

If you are trying to apply the updates in Ubuntu (11.04 Natty Narwhal in this case) and you get error message telling you that

“An unhandlable error occured”

There seems to be a programming error in aptdaemon, the software that allows you to install/remove software and to perform other package management related tasks.

If you try upgrading via command line with: sudo apt-get upgrade

you would encounter a different set of error messages, something akin

E: The package index files are corrupted. No Filename: field for package tzdata.

Apparently the source of this error could be several, most likely ones are, that your upgrade process broke off prematurely the last time it was being performed, or the source that you have listed is not getting the latest updates. Anyway running the following commands in succession fixed the issue for me:

sudo apt-get clean

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

If the above steps don’t fix it for you, then try changing your default repository from synaptic’s repository list and try running above commands again.