When you are running an update in Ubuntu, there are plenty of problems that could possibly occur. One of them is the “Problem with MergeList… The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.“. There can be causes for this, and one of them is probably due to too many repositories in your system.

The fix for this is very simple. Simply run the following commands in the terminal:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf
sudo apt-get update

What the above commands did is to remove all the package lists in your system and re-fetch them with the system update command.

Note: Make sure all other package managers are closed before you run the above commands, or else it won’t work.