Re: Dselect suddenly vanished from potato?
Vitux <viggovap@mail.worldonline.dk> wrote:
>The strangest thing: Dselect has vanished! (or maybe just
>crapped out?)
>Normally, I would log in as root, type dselect, and off we go
>installing stuff.
>Now, I get "bash: dselect: command not found".
>Ok, maybe there's some path been lost:
>~#whereis dselect
>Dselect: /usr/bin/dselect
>Let's try it, then:
>~#/usr/bin/dselect
>bash: usr/bin/dselect: Input/output error
It sounds like something dselect's calling is dying, perhaps - or
alternatively you might have a disk problem. Could you run 'strace
dselect' or 'strace /usr/bin/dselect' as root and post at least the end
of the log that results, please?
If you don't have the strace package (you should, as it's standard),
then download it manually and 'dpkg -i' the package file.
>The really weird part is, I've used it just today to install the
>mach64-xserver from which I'm typing this?! Along with mach64 (which I
>chose to install) potato wanted to install lots of stuff I'm not using,
>including emacs, xemacs, and a german dictionary (I don't even speak
>german).
emacs20 is standard; xemacs21 may be getting pulled in by something. The
German dictionary is odd - perhaps you're getting slightly confused by
dselect here. ispell (a standard package) recommends ispell-dictionary,
and igerman/ingerman happen to provide this. When you install ispell,
dselect's dependency resolution screen will pop up a list of all the
available packages providing ispell-dictionary, with the idea that you
choose one of them. Once you get used to it, the lower pane that
provides descriptions of the current problems - and of the packages,
too, if you hit 'i' - can be very helpful.
>I chose not to install most of this, except for some gnomelibs and a
>few other libs, which I figured might be important.
Did you have to override dselect in its ideas about dependencies? If so,
you might have removed or failed to install something important ... you
didn't uninstall libstdc++2.10 or any of the ncurses stuff, did you?
If that's the problem, you'll likely be able to recover it with plain
dpkg, though it might take a bit of to-and-froing on this mailing list.
:)
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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