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apt-get says E: Couldn't find package package-name. What should I do?

First off, check your source list of packages. It resides in /etc/apt/sources.list or in the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/. If both are empty, then apt-get doesn't know where to get the packages from. Here's a sample sources.list file:

# See sources.list(5) for more information, especially
     # Remember that you can only use http, ftp or file URIs
     # CDROMs are managed through the apt-cdrom tool.
     deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
     deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free
     deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free
     
     # Uncomment if you want the apt-get source function to work
     #deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
     #deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free

Secondly, you may have forgotten to run apt-get update after editing the sources.list file. To fix this, just run:

$ apt-get update

That's it.

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