Comment 2 for bug 1022386

You might want to run "sudo bzr break-lock /etc".

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This line worked 100% for me, after surfing the net for ages, finding a whole bunch of crud about killing processes and looking for files, uninstalling etckeeper. this single line got me back to "apt-get install" and seems to have fixed my package problems.

I had a package error with virtualbox dpkg. This seems to have locked me out of my Ubuntu 10.0.4 package upgrades and updating. my /etc directory was locked for approx. 1500 hours - thats like 50 days! It may well have been another package, I don't know. All I know for sure is that bzr was playing up, acting bizaare and I couldn't install ANYTHING since my /etc was locked. It's simple now, if you think about it. Son't worry too much about downloading installing stuff, you just need to unlock your /etc directory. Look at the error messages and really try to get a feel of the problem, I knew my system was LOCKED in some way.

Anyway, now it's unlocked, I'll post back if there's any problems, it seems to have installed my ruby gems and git nicely.

Many Thanks!
Jeremy.