Gfilui

E: /var/cache/apt/archives/chromium-browser-l10n_64.0.3282.167-
0ubuntu0.16.04.1_all.deb: cannot copy extracted data for 
'./usr/lib/chromium-browser/locales/ta.pak' to '/usr/lib/chromium-
browser/locales/ta.pak.dpkg-new': unexpected end of file or stream

I started my laptop one morning to find that the package manager had a broken package. This isn't the first issue I've had with the package manager.

There was once I had to delete dpkg-available because there was a 'missing maintainer'. After running apt-get update, everything worked fine.

Well, now the same error is back again, and now Chromium browser is "broken" (but it still runs just fine). It gives me the out put above when I try to update it.

Usually, the error that I had before was just a warn, and I could do anything I please on the package manager. It still shows itself as a warn, but now, the broken package doesn't let me use it anymore.

How can I get that darn file to keep from corrupting my whole package system?

Well, this is one of those situations where as soon as I post the question, the answer appears. Might as well post it to help everyone else.

FIrstly, thanks to @N0rbert; his comment on the question led me to the solution, so if this helps you, upvote his comment; it was essentially the answer.

The rest is somewhat trivial. I opened synaptic, and looked into broken packages. There I found the Chromium language packages, and so I purged the language packages and Chromium. Obviously, this didn't work, because there were broken packages.

So, I ran in a terminal:

sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/chromium-browser-l10n_64.0.3282.167-0ubuntu0.16.04.1_all.deb
and
sudo apt-get update (credit to N0rbert)

Then, I purged the language packs using sudo apt-get purge chromium-browser-l10n chromium-browser and then I simply reinstalled them: sudo apt-get install chromium-browser chromium-browser-l10n.

I'm still not sure if the language packs are necessary when you're only using English, or if Chromium would have run if I just purged the language packs, but all that matters now is that I have my package manager back!

Sometimes package managers can be so unpredictable...