Re: can't apt-get install
Thanks for giving a try at the testing branch. Whatever feedback you can
give will be greatly appreciated by the Debian developpers.
Great! :-) Thanks for your reply.
Took a long time as the ISP hat some problem, losing a lot of packets,
as I would figure out later. Finally, when it rebooted, I got to the
command line login prompt, leaving me wondering whether the dist came
without a desktop environment by default. As I would later figure out,
too, the debian installer simply left out packages it lost TCP
connection on, without re-trying to get them or asking the user what to
do! Who the f* is responsible for that design? Anyway...
Probably someone who spent days of their free time in providing the
debian-installer. Anyway...
Just expressing my frustration. People should regard it as constructive
criticism. :-)
You certainly want to send a bug report against debian-installer, at
least as a feature request. If the installer drops only packages that
are not necessary to reboot and fix the system later, it would only be a
feature request, though.
Second day: ISP's problem was resolved. Tried to "apt-get install
gnome". After having downloaded all new packages, apt-get simply hang at
99%. Forver. Without CPU load. Did apt-get clean/autoclean/update.
Changed net source. No change. Reproducable.
Decided to re-format and re-install. This time everything seemed fine,
after reboot I immediately got into the gnome environment. Of course I
immediately wanted to install some packages again. BUT! Again the same
problem! Small packages worked fine, e.g. "apt-get install madplay". But
I couldn't install any bigger packages like xmms or lyx. What is going
on here? Anyone has a clue?
Looks to me like you've hit a bug in dpkg or apt-get. Again, it's very
helpful if you can report it.
Now as to getting around this problem (and investigating its cause, so
your bug report is more useful), I would try using aptitude instead of
apt-get (works the same way on the command line), if you can install
aptitude that is. I would also try downloading some of the packages
manually from packages.debian.org (they may be already in you cache,
somewhere near /var/cache/apt/something), and installing them using
dpkg. If any of these works, you know the problem is in apt-get.
Note that you can still use apt-get to resolve the dependencies for you
if you end up having to install packages manually (for as long as the
bug your're reporting is not fixed): simply do a dry apt-get run (see
the manpages) and install manually the packages that apt-get wants to
install.
You can also do a "ps | grep dpkg" when apt-get hangs to see whether or
not it's really dpkg that hangs.
It's really, really weird...
First, I invoked apt-get install xmms to find out which program was
actually hanging. It was just apt-get itself, no dpkg was in the process
table. So I next tried with aptitude, and that program complained about
58 unused packages that were going to be removed! Oddly, half of these
packages where essential gnome packages that were definitely in use,
such as gnome-core!
In between, while in the gnome DE, I got a notification that updates
where available, and I accepted to install them. The gnome updater
started downloading the updates, and - funny thing - just before it
finished downloading, at around 98 or 99%, it hang. I waited and finally
pressed Cancel, I got a popup saying that not all packages could be
downloaded and if I wanted to proceed. I pressed Yes, and the program
started to install. During this process I repeatedly got the following
error:
I/O warning : failed to load external entity
"/var/lib/scrollkeeper/(null)/scrollkeeper_cl.xml"
Weird... shouldn't (null) be something like the language?
Back to aptitude... I invoked aptitude -f which found 2 or 3 broken
dependencies and those 58 "unused" packages. Quit it, did aptitude
install on all those "unused" packages, which surprisingly worked, then
let aptitude fix the broken dependencies. Did
update/check/clean/autoclean for both apt-get and aptitude. Tried
apt-get install xmms, still hang. Same with aptitude.
Next, tried apt-get dist-upgrade. There was only one package that was
going to be upgraded, it was cdrdao. The new packages that were going to
be installed were cdrdao and libvorbisfile3. I proceeded, and -
surprise! - even for this apt-get struggled! Ctrl-C. Tried with aptitude
which now complained about a broken cdrdao package! WTF! Explicitely did
aptitude install cdrdao, and when downloading the new packages, it hang
just as usual. Ctrl-C.
Ok, took a look into /var/cache/apt/archive. Figured, there was the
downloaded cdrdao package but no libvorbisfile3! So apt-get and aptitude
struggled with the last package downloading! What is going on here?
Fired up web browser to manually download libvorbisfile3 from the
testing branch, copied it to the apt archive directory, and invoked
aptitude install cdrdao again. Here's the captured output:
The following packages are BROKEN:
cdrdao
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
cdrdao: Depends: libvorbisfile3 (>= 1.1.2) but it is not installable
Resolving dependencies...
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
Downgrade the following packages:
cdrdao [1:1.2.1-7 (testing, now) -> 1:1.2.1-6 (<NULL>)]
Score is 20
Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] n
Resolving dependencies...
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
Install the following packages:
libvorbisfile3 [1.1.2-1 (<NULL>, testing)]
Score is -19
Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?]
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
libvorbisfile3
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libvorbisfile3
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/18.3kB of archives. After unpacking 49.2kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]
Writing extended state information... Done
Selecting previously deselected package libvorbisfile3.
(Reading database ... 65851 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libvorbisfile3 (from .../libvorbisfile3_1.1.2-1_i386.deb) ...
Setting up libvorbisfile3 (1.1.2-1) ...
Setting up cdrdao (1.2.1-7) ...
I'm close on the verge of wiping out this installation again.
Any ideas? Thanks for all feedback!
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