Hmm. The strace rather suggests you messed with your config file in a nasty way. open("/var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 5 lseek(5, 50000, SEEK_SET) = 50000 See, that number defults to a couple meg, not 50k. Jason