I broke Debbie and I don't know how to fix her.

Now I've done it. I've been using the update button that opens Synaptic package manager to keep Debbie (my Debian 4.0 Home Server) up to date. I haven't had a problem with her for over a year. But something broke with this last kernel update I think. I can't really tell for sure since she's been trouble free until now.

It happened when Samba tried to update from -9etch to -10etch.

The following message is what I get:

Software index is broken

It is impossible to install or remove any software. Please use the package manager "Synaptic" or run "sudo apt-get install -f" in a terminal to fix this issue at first.

When I attempt to run the apt-get command line listed in the error message above, I get another message after it attempts to upgrade Samba:

Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following extra packages will be upgraded: samba 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 1 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0B/3262kB of archives. After unpacking 139kB of additional disk space will be used Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y Pre-configuring packages . . . Could not exec dpkg! E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (100)

So it looks like its jammed and there is likely some command script file or an executable missing. If I use Synaptic I get the same sort of message and nothing makes much sense.

So what did I screw up? Anybody got an idea?