Kubuntu Natty Update Weirdness

I just updated to Kubuntu 11.04 (Natty Beta 2) last night. All went reasonably well except for a few hitches:

• Inexplicably, several apps were uninstalled including GIMP and Wine. Easily remedied.
• This weird error message proved more difficult to fix:

dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 20544
package 'handbrake-gtk':
error in Version string 'svn3834ppa1~maverick1':
version number does not start with digit

Very odd because handbrake-gtk wasn’t installed on the system at the time of the upgrade. It was installed via a PPA some months ago, then deleted, and I thought I had wiped all traces of it away… Apparently not.

I tried a bunch of solutions from various forums until I hit on this one which worked:

sudo dpkg --clear-avail && sudo apt-get update

All in all, one of the smoothest upgrades I’ve had with Kubuntu (I always do it during beta; I’m too impatient to wait for the release to mature).  And KDE (now version 4.6.2) just gets more gorgeous with every incarnation.  Be sure to invite your friends over for a look, so they can see what the next version of Windows will be stealing.

Happy hacking.