[Sussex]The first of the Debian based confusion(s)

[John D.]

Ok, so if I try to install just about anything, I'm getting errors like this

Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... dpkg: error processing 
/var/cache/apt/archives/libc6-dev_2.3.2.ds1-21_i386.deb (--unpack):
 files list file for package `libgtk1.2-common' is missing final newline
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6-dev_2.3.2.ds1-21_i386.deb
Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
root at johnsPC:

Obviously somethings not right, but what?

regards

John D.