tasksel fails because base-config doesn't add a Debian mirror to /etc/apt/sources.list
Base System Installation Checklist:
[O] = OK, [E] = Error (please elaborate below), [ ] = didn't try it
Initial boot: [O]
Detect network card: [O]
Configure network: [O]
Detect CD: [O]
Load installer modules: [O]
Detect hard drives: [O]
Partition hard drives: [O]
Install base system: [O]
Clock/timezone setup: [O]
User/password setup: [O]
Install tasks: [E]
Install boot loader: [O]
Overall install: [E]
Comments/Problems:
This bug is easily reproducable on systems which are connected
to the Internet via an ADSL modem (ethernet with DHCP). Simply
trying to install Debian 3.1 on such systems triggers this bug.
(To trigger this bug, one has to select the "Web Server" option
in the tasksel menu.)
tasksel failed because the /etc/apt/sources.list file written by
base-config contained references only to the binary installation
CDs and security.debian.org. Because /etc/apt/sources.list did
not contain a regular Debian mirror URL, the aptitude command
executed by tasksel exited with the following error:
=== Error begin ===
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree
Initializing package states... Done
Reading task descriptions... Done
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
E: Unable to correct dependencies, some packages cannot be installed
E: Unable to resolve some dependencies!
Some packages had unmet dependencies. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
spamassasin: Depends: libdigest-sha1-perl which is a virtual package.
libapache2-mod-php4: Depends: libzzip-0-12 (>= 0.12.03) which is a virtual package
tasksel: aptitude failed
=== Error end ===
To fix this, I had to manually add a ftp.XX.debian.org line to
/etc/apt/sources.list
The following is the /etc/apt/sources.list file written by
base-config (Note that this one contains only the security
archive and not a regular Debian mirror):
#deb file:///cdrom/ sarge main
deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 r5 _Sarge_ - Official i386 Binary-2 (20070219)]/ unstable contrib
main
deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 r5 _Sarge_ - Official i386 Binary-1 (20070219)]/ unstable contrib
main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib
/etc/apt/sources.list after the manual addition of a Debian mirror
deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 r5 _Sarge_ - Official i386 Binary-2 (20070219)]/ unstable contrib
main
deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 r5 _Sarge_ - Official i386 Binary-1 (20070219)]/ unstable contrib
main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib
deb http://ftp.tr.debian.org/debian/ stable main
After I - in another virtual console - added a regular Debian
mirror to the sources.list file and ran apt-get update, the aptitude
command executed by tasksel worked properly.
It is possible to manually add a Debian mirror to /etc/apt/sources.list
but one has to switch to the menu using "Go Back". In other words,
if the user follows the installation process in a regular fashion,
this error occurs.
The problem is that a Debian mirror is not automatically written
into /etc/apt/sources.list by base-config. If a Debian mirror
were written in sources.list, then the error quoted above would
not have occurred.
Thanks in advance for fixes/comments/etc.
situert
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