Re: dselect/dpkg problem: install/remove

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

> 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's not likely that dpkg/dselect put the system in this state on its own.
Things that wedge the system and then make e2fsck not run generally have
to do with the shared library files containing corrupt data. This could
be a problem with the data on the disk, or bad RAM. Probably a re-install
would be a good idea at this point, since the data on the disk is suspect.

We have taken some hits because we were using a brand-new Linux 2.0 kernel,
but this does not sound like one of those.

People get upset when I point at hardware, because of course Windows 95
runs fine on the system and the power-on test passes. However, many people
on this list have found that Linux exercises features of your system that
DOS and Windows don't ever touch. We get a lot of "I really didn't believe
it was hardware but then I fixed the hardware and it got better" email.

I run Debian on 5 different computers without stability problems.

	Thanks

	Bruce