linux-common-tools are not installed due to conflict with linux-base

1. The first recommendation is
sudo apt-get -f install

2. However, in my case, the package linux-common-tools were incompletely installed, which was not resolved by the above.

I did
sudo dpkg --remove linux-base
sudo apt-get -f install

It worked.  In ubuntu, linux-common-tools are equivalent to linux-base (a debian package).