Re: dpkg problems...
Hi Charles
On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 12:48:52PM -0500, vze26m98 wrote:
> Sorry to bother, but I'm a fairly new user and have dug myself into a
> hole
... Welcome to the Club ... :)
> and my searches of the Debian lists haven't turned up what I'm
> needing.
>
> Recently did an install of Woody on a Pismo, things have been fine.
>
> Added the Debian testing distributions to my sources.list. Got a
> zillion things to upgrade, which I started in on.
>
> deselect warned me about quitting xdm when it started to install glibc
> (I think that was the name). I quit and tried to stop xdm. Eventually
> figured that out.
>
> Re-ran dselect to return to the install process, but it stopped again on
> the xfs install, which (if I remember) said it was broken. I accepted
> the choice to continue.
I gave up using dselect some time ago: I feel this tool is similar to
Windoze, a bit: I never really understood what was going on when using
it, IIRC .. :)
I'd try this:
Seeing what your system thinks about the status of the installed packages:
dpkg -C
The latter should give you some information on what's wrong with your installs.
If it does not tell you what is wrong try one of the following commands:
The following should configure all unpacked but unconfigured packages:
dpkg --configure -a
Doing the same with a single package:
dpkg --configure <single package>
dpkg-reconfigure <single package>
If all this will not help, I'd try to reinstall the package that can't
be reconfigured for some reason, in the following, as an example, xfs,
apt-get install --reinstall xfs
I'm not sure if the latter will work, please see below ...
For *all* commands above, except perhaps "dpkg -C", first do a dry-run
with the "--simulate" option, so apt-get/dpkg might hopefully warn you
in case you're gonna enter something that could be wrong ... :)
...something like
dpkg --simulate --configure -a
dpkg-reconfigure seems to be blind to the "--simulate" option.
>
> dselect eventually gave up, saying that dpkg-preconfigure didn't exist,
> which was true.
>
> I now have dselect telling me that I've got 37 packages to upgrade, but
> nothing happens. The upgrade clearly isn't complete, as I can type "man
> dpkg-preconfigure" and it can't find man.
>
> [ ... ]
I'd guess you can't install anything else until you fixed the problems
with the packages already installed, or perhaps better: half-installed ...
Good luck, and please come back if it doesn't work ...
Best Regards
Wolfgang
--
Wolfgang Pfeiffer
http://profiles.yahoo.com/wolfgangpfeiffer
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