Re: Newbie problems galore

[listcomm@ml1.net]

>     I need to pass things back-and-forth between Linux and Windoze.  I 
> see references to VFAT FS on the web site, but for the life of me, I 
> can't find a trace of the software.  It's really bad to have to play 
> games with tar at both sides of the route in order not to munge up the 
> "magic" pathnames.  PLEASE don't tell me that the evil beast of Redmond 
> has buried VFAT under a patent claim!!  If not, please, where can I find
> it?

When I installed "woody" from the CDs, during the partitioning and
mounting
process of the first part of the install, the install found the
Windows partitions.  It was then possible to identify them as VFAT file
systems
during the next phase of the install, and the install then generated the
correct
mtab or fstab or whatever it is this week entries for them and I had
access
to my Gatesware "drives" the outset.  (I was impressed.)

I still haven't figured out how to make the Linux data visible from
within
Windoze, other than scribbling files from Linux onto one of the
VFAT-mounted
drives.

> 
>     Right now, I've managed to hork up my package data so dpkg gets hung 
> up trying to fix things.  My best bet seems to be to restart from 
> scratch.  How do I get dpkg / apt / aptitude to clean my machine 
> totally, or what files should I remove to make all this stuff go away?   
> Or, would it really be quicker to re-init my partitions and start again 
> from the CD?

I am the next-to-the-last person on this list to be capable of
commenting
on this.  But, I ended up in a similar situation (read my postings for
the agonizing details), and my experience was that "dpkg" was too
low-level and
"apt-get" too limited to help (someone on here commented that it was
originally
just an experimental implementation which got out of control...)  BUT...
*dselect* rescued my system.  I went through the 6-or-7-step program
with it and it
was able to compute the correct reload from CD-ROM (using the "apt-get"
method
- you do have a correct "sources.list" file with your CD-ROM entries in
it,
that got generated when you did the install, right?).  (Warning:  You
will
*hate* dselect, if you try it.)