Synaptic not showing all packages

On a fresh VMware install of Ubuntu 8.10 I ran into the problem where additional packages weren't showing up in the Synaptic Package Manager. I've seen this before and have previously been able to resolve it. Once and for all I'm going to blog the fix so I can find it for future reference.

1. Open up a terminal
2. Enter the command: sudo update-apt-xapian-index
3. Restart Synaptic Package Manager when the update is complete
   
4. You may need to reload the package information by clicking Ctrl-R
5. It should work fine now

Hope this can help other people annoyed by this problem.