I can't say what steps brought me into this:

→ sudo apt-get upgrade 

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information... Done

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

1 not fully installed or removed.

After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

dpkg: error processing libtiff4 (--configure):

 libtiff4:i386 3.9.5-1ubuntu1.1 cannot be configured because libtiff4:k386 is in a different version (3.9.5-1ubuntu1)

Errors were encountered while processing:

 libtiff4

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

The following commands all end up in the same error:

sudo apt-get install -f

sudo dpkg --configure -a

sudo apt-get --fix-broken install

sudo apt-get --fix-missing install

sudo apt-get clean

sudo apt-get autoclean

sudo apt-get autoremove

How to solve these kind of problems? And what did I do wrong?

UPDATE
I managed to get apt working again by downgrading to previous version (3.9.5-1ubuntu1). However, next upgrade led to the same problem. But there is more info now:

(Reading database ... 

dpkg: warning: files list file for package `libtiff4:k386' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.

(Reading database ... 281166 files and directories currently installed.)

Preparing to replace libtiff4 3.9.5-1ubuntu1 (using .../libtiff4_3.9.5-1ubuntu1.1_i386.deb) ...

Unpacking replacement libtiff4 ...

dpkg: error processing libtiff4 (--configure):

 libtiff4:i386 3.9.5-1ubuntu1.1 cannot be configured because libtiff4:k386 is in a different version (3.9.5-1ubuntu1)

No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already

                                                              Errors were encountered while processing:

 libtiff4

So the real problem seems to be the missing libtiff4:k386 package. And k386 seems like a stupid typo somewhere.

I tracked down the file that introduces the typo:

**/var/lib/dpkg/status**



Package: libtiff4

Status: install ok half-configured

Multi-Arch: same

Priority: optional

Section: libs

Installed-Size: 528

Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>

Architecture: k386

Source: tiff

Version: 3.9.5-1ubuntu1

Config-Version: 3.9.5-1ubuntu1

Depends: libc6 (>= 2.11), libjpeg62 (>= 6b1), zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4)

Pre-Depends: multiarch-support

Description: Tag Image File Format (TIFF) library

 libtiff is a library providing support for the Tag Image File Format

 (TIFF), a widely used format for storing image data.  This package

 includes the shared library.

Homepage: http://libtiff.maptools.org

Original-Maintainer: Jay Berkenbilt <[email protected]>

Fixing the typo solves the problem.