Slink -> Potato upgrade problem WORKAROUND
Hi, all. I am a more or less experienced debian user, and I want to share this
with you;
I went through a few "minor" problems, when I recently decided that I had
scr*wed up my
system(Potato) and it was time for a reinstall.
I reinstalled from a set of Slink CDs, and proceeded to do an apt-get update and
an apt-get dist-upgrade from the nearest mirror.
this upgrade went wrong with the following error; (or something similar)
Removing bash;
Installing libreadlineg2;
Confing libreadlineg2;
Installing bash; error; cannot execute bla-bla-bla; no such file or directory;
Now bash was gone, and I had no idea how to fix it, except for changing shell to
tcsh, (and that's no workaround).
I suspected that the mirror was broken or in the process of an update, so I
reinstalled and tried 5 other mirrors, and it went exactly the same way every
time, even if I tried to upgrade with dselect.
At this point I was ready for a mental institution! (&:o$)
I now suspected that something was wrong with the new bash and libreadlineg2, so
I reinstalled, put them on hold in dselect, and upgraded with dselect.
This time everything went smooth, except for a minor error, where I had to kill
cron manually
to install a newer version of cron (or something else).
Now I had a working system, and thought of looking at this mailinglist, and I
could see from other mails on this list, that others have had the same problem.
Someone suggested to use ash instead when bash is gone(thanks, pal!), and I
found this to be a valid workaround;
(still with bash and libreadlineg2 on hold)
install ash with dselect or maybe apt-get (I used dselect)
now select bash and libreadline for upgrading, and (try to) install. When the
error occurs, quit dselect and do;
cd /bin
ln -s ash sh
start dselect again and install, and bash gets installed, and your system is
O.K. again.
(and all packages are up-to-date)
If you have already had this error and you don't have ash installed, I don't
know how to get it
working again. Maybe with a manual install of ash from a tar.gz?
I have not been able to find a homepage or anything similar for ash, not even on
the NetBSD site, does anyone know where to get a gzipped tarball with ash, so
one can install ash manually ?
Regards
Jens C. Denmark
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