Re: i screwed up my computer with alien (second try...)

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Wow, in all my years maintaining alien, I have never had a report of
someone messing up their system like this. Pity you missed this note
that is in the man page, and on alien's web page:

       Alien should not be used to replace important system pack­
       ages, like init, libc, or other things that are essential
       for the functioning of your system. Many of these packages
       are set up differently by the different distributions, and
       packages from the different distributions cannot be used
       interchangeably. In general, if you can't remove a package
       without breaking your system, don't try to replace it with
       an alien version.

But I guess now all we can try to do is pick up the peices..

j.pepas@mail.utexas.edu wrote:
> basically, i screwed up my debian install by force installing some rpm's.
> 
> i was trying to get dvd playback working, and mplayer sounded like what i wanted.

avifile-player in debian testing might be what you want, though I'm not entirely sure it's
the same thing.
 
> unfortunately only rpms (not debs) exist for it as of this moment. so i
> was going through this process of downloading rpms and converting them to
> satisfy mplayers dependancies.  things went well until i needed libtinfo.so.5,
> which rpmfind *claimed* would be provided by the ncurses rpm.
> unfortuantely, it didnt provide it.  in fact, i had to do dpkg --force-all
> -i ncurses... in order to install it, which was dumb, i admit.  it didnt finish
> installing because it encoutered an error - it could find libtinfo.so.5 so
> then i find myself in a situation where i cant install anything, or remove
> anything, even with force options.  
> my current situation: 

> Removing ncurses ... 
> /bin/sh: error while loading shared libraries: libtinfo.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So this looks like you have a ncurses library that links to this mysterious libtinfo that
I've never heard of. And bash, sadly, needs ncurses to function, so /bin/sh fails.

*DON'T LOG OUT*. If you have (I hope you didn't reboot into windows), it's rescue disk
time.

So your first step is to get a working /bin/sh. I suggest you try to install ash. The
install will probably fail part way through since ash's postinst uses /bin/sh (in stable
anyway), but you will be a /bin/ash on your system. Then make a backup copy of /bin/sh, and
copy /bin/sh over it:

$ cp /bin/sh /bin/sh

Ash is a fine replacement for /bin/sh. If this doesn't work for some reason though, you
can also try hunting down a statically linked bash and dropping it in /bin/sh.

This should get you to the point where you can remove this ncurses alien package, and
reinstall libncurses5 (or is it libncurses4 on debian stable? I forget):

$ apt-get --reinstall install libncurses5

That should get you to the point where /bin/bash will work again, and from there you
should be able to recover.

-- 
see shy jo