Re: /etc/alternatives not working properly

[Wackojacko <wackojacko32@ntlworld.com>]

Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 08:43:36AM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 04:14:55PM +0000, Wackojacko wrote:
> > > Due to changing partitions around I managed to mess up my Debian Sid 
> > > AMD64 install.  I reinstalled from scratch and then restored my /etc 
> > > directory from a backup.  Now none of the commands in /etc/alternative 
> > > work (java, wx-config x-www-browser etc).  All of the symlinks are 
> > > present and I have tried update-alternatives --all with no luck.
> > >
> > > If I add /etc/alternatives to my PATH then they work again, but I don't 
> > > remember having to do this before.
> > >
> > > Should /etc/alternatives be in my PATH, if so should I add it to 
> > > /etc/profile.  If not, anyone got any ideas how to restore the 
> > > alternatives system to its former state?

Andrew

Thanks for the responses

> > not in my path... have you checked out /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives? its
> > all text files and may relate to your problem.

This seems to be just the options used by the update-alternatives 
command when --config is chosen.  Seems OK.

> hmmm... I did some more poking around, maybe this helps
>
> typing x-www-browser loads iceweasel. so that works. 
>
> which x-www-browser returns /usr/bin/x-www-browser which is a symlink
> to /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser. so, do you have symlinks in
> /usr/bin (and probably elsewhere) that point to the /etc/alternatives
> directory? 
>
> hth
>
> A

It certainly does, I do not have all of these symlinks.  Obviously, I 
can create them manually but I would prefer to know why they disappeared 
in the first place.  What command is suppose to create them?

Thanks

Wackojacko