Re: Borked update
On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 02:12:36PM +0800, Katipo wrote:
> Martin J. Hillyer wrote:
>
> >After a small fling with Gnome, and trying to remove it, I'm having
> >trouble getting my system updated. I've been flailing around a fair
> >bit, so a reinstall may be my only option at this point. But perhaps
> >someone here could show me a way to avoid that. I was running
> >unstable, and got this problem; downgrading to testing didn't make the
> >problem go away.
> >
[much of original message snipped...]
> Hello Martin,
>
> Looks as though we are in the same boat, so lets get something going here.
> I'm in the process of stripping down Gnome 2.4, and it is a minefield of
> interdependencies.
> I know that nautilus-media and the nautilus package are dependent, so if
> you install the package nautilus that may help with nautilus-media.
> I've purged both nautilus and nautilus-media so far, If I need that type
> of file manager, gmc will do it, and there are better multimedia
> packages than nautilus-media.
>
> The only other thing that I have been able to glean so far, as I've just
> started, is the gnome dependency on libgnome2-perl.
>
> For the rest, the impression is the problem is with debconf, from the
> downgrade.
> Have you tried a reinstall of debconf testing?
> Regards,
>
> David.
>
That turned out to be a great hint! I used dselect to install
nautilus, it installed, upgraded nautilus-media and all the other
packages that were pending and left me with a package system that has
no broken installs (dpkg -C now comes up with nothing). Both debconf
and perl seem to be OK. I used dselect because the previous problems
were causing aptitude to lose its database and hang, meaning I had to
kill it from another console.
One thing I did see - when I rebooted my machine (it's dual-boot and I
needed to print some photos on a USB dye-sub printer), fsck told me
that my /usr partition had duplicate/bad inodes and to run fsck
manually. When I did, answering 'y' to all questions, there are in
/usr/lost+found 29 files with names like #128268. These appear to be
perl scripts (I don't know perl). But I've not noticed any ill
effects from this, and the output of dpkg -l perl* is exactly as
before. I assume these files are copies of the duplicate inodes and the
originals are still in place?
I'm planning to try and purge more gnome tomorrow - I need to get some
sleep after last night's struggles :-). I'll keep you informed as to
progress (or regress) - offline, I guess.
--
Martin Hillyer
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