Re: dselect/dpkg problem: install/remove

[Mike Miller <miller5@uiuc.edu>]

>>>>> "john" == John Houwen <slyder@voicenet.com> writes:
    > I seem to have a similar problem with dselect/dpkg, but not
    > with the dpkg-ftp option (haven't gotten that far yet)

    > The dselect package has given me problems from the first. I
    > made a few errors in my 1st attempt at the CDRom install,
    > but managed to get most of the selected packages unpacked &
    > installed.  Where dselect hung was on the
    > kernel-source/kernel-headers packages. (where is
    > local/binary ??)

[snip]


This sounds like the problem that I'm having.  I installed debian
on a new system and all went well until I tried to use dselect to
install the kernel-source package.  While doing that, dpkg
crashed with a segmentation fault.  So I tried to use dselect to
purge the kernel-source package and again dpkg crashed, this time
leaving me with a hung system.  All I could do was power cycle my
machine since the keyboard was apparently frozen and I could not
log in on any other consoles.  This left me with a bad disk which
I cannot fix because now e2fsck crashes with a segmentation
fault.  It looks like I'm going to have to reformat my hard disk
and reinstall from scratch. :(

I don't have any answers for you, but you are not alone.  I'm
tempted to try a different distribution in hopes of getting a
stable system.

I'll let you know if I come up with any solutions.

Mike

-- 
Michael A. Miller                              miller5@uiuc.edu
  Nuclear Physics Lab, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  PGP public key at <URL:http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/miller5>