In de link van donpedro II staat ook deze bijdrage:
I recently had this problem myself; however, in my case, the file was corrupted rather than simply truncated, so just adding a newline wasn't sufficient. For anyone with this problem who can't get it to work after running the script above (or getting errors afterwards), I recommend renaming or deleting the old list file and purging the package. You'll get a missing file error from dpkg, but it will let you remove the problem package.
Either way, I'd recommend that you either purge or reinstall the package once you've cleared the dpkg failure, as there may be subtle faults in the truncated list file that wouldn't be evident immediately.
Met andere woorden (als ik het goed begrijp): rtkit verwijderen (sudo apt-get purge rtkit) en terug installeren (zie post ivo). Dat lijkt me gemakkelijker dan een python-script toepassen.