apt wickened up: Unable to purge package gdm2 !
Hello List !
Usually apt/itude works without problems here. But this time seems i kicked
it really bad.... :|
I upgraded to Gnome2 for woody on i386 and decided at one point to purge gdm2.
Well there was this warning 'directory /etc/gdm/<some> not empty so not
removed', leaving it half-configured.
Since i suspect Gnome to be still to be sensible with obsolet configs i just
removed /etc/gdm completely by hand.
I thought that a complete 'purge' would left no remainders,
so why problems with that if I know I don't need the configs anymore ??
Btw I didn't ever run gdm before. There could have been only defaults.
Now i decided to install the 'old' gdm instead ( I refer to as gdm1 now),
purged gdm2 again just to see what it says now.
Now, this second 'purge' still left the package 'half-configured' !
With an error message shown from subprocess dpkg:
Error Code(1) while processing gdm2, unable to access the archive -- file not
found ( please note: i translate from german what i understood was the
meaning here ).
Next two hours i tried a lot of tricky things.
Install again, reinstall, reconfigure, remove, purge,
( however, i didn't manage the syntax of --force-reinstreq ),
with apt and with dpkg and at least even tried dselect -- nothing worked,
same error.
I wasn't able to purge gdm2 !
It's impossible to read the first occuring error messages because it's
immediateley replaced by the colored chooser ... and no logs in var... :|
Sometimes the error is additional refered to as No. 10...At one point i
catched a glimpse it's postrm complaining.
So i looked upt that script, and then compared the files in /etc/gdm to
/var/lib/dpkg/info/gdm{1,2}. With gdm1 installed (aptitude) (!) I noticed
two *mysterious* circumstances there:
/etc/gdm ( which never got removed at all ) is empty.
No sessions, gdm.conf.... thus the installation went totally wrong, but from
aptitude is shown up successful !
And: In /var/lib/dpkg/info/ therere are all the gdm2-files like gdm2.list,
but no gdm1 files at all.
gdm simply isn't completely installed, and can't be managed no more at all.
I reloaded the files several times from CD, so could there be a corruption
not detecded by the md5sum ? I use official woody 3.0 r1 cd's from a well
known german seller, plus 2 extra-cd's with gnome2 and kde3 for woody, don't
know the source.
On the other hand, can the apt-database get corrupted using aptitude ?
And still i can't get it: purging should be possible anyway ?
I'm worried about trusting either me or Gnome or apt no more...
now what i really would like to have is a clean system and database...just to
feel trusting again.
Help greatly appreciated !
--
mich{a,l}.
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