reconfigure Debian packages database

Your Adept Manager can't start regularly, prompting you an error message like this

You will not be able to change your system settings in any way (install, remove or upgrade software), because another process is using the packaging system database (probably some other Adept application or apt-get or aptitude). Please close the other application before using this one.

and you are pretty sure no application at all is using the pckg-db (you checked with ps and killed everything was even remotely speculated to be related with adept/apt; you even did this after a fresh reboot of the system...)?

Maybe your problem is due to an update/install crazing. For me this

sudo dpkg --configure -a

make everything back to normal. Hope this can help.

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From the man dpkg page:

       dpkg --configure package ... | -a | --pending
              Reconfigure  an unpacked package. If -a or --pending is given instead of package, all
              unpacked but unconfigured packages are configured.

              Configuring consists of the following steps:

              1. Unpack the configuration files, and at the same time back up the old configuration
              files, so that they can be restored if something goes wrong.

              2. Run postinst script, if provided by the package.

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