charlie derr wrote:
The above is in response to apt-get -f install (what used to work in the past for fixing issues, maybe that's my mistake?)It is better to use "aptitude install -f" if aptitude is your package manager of choice. Anyway, it seems that you have a problem running update-gconf-defaults, which is called in many installation scripts, the ones of desktop-base among them. This might be caused by an issue with the libxml2 package or it could be the symptom of a more general problem with python on your system.Thanks much for that explanation.Let's see, which output do you get from these two commands: dpkg -l libxml2 gconf2 | awk '/^[^D|+]/{print $1,$2,$3}'delete:~# dpkg -l libxml2 gconf2 | awk '/^[^D|+]/{print $1,$2,$3}' ii gconf2 2.20.1-2 ii libxml2 2.6.30.dfsg-3/usr/bin/python -Vdelete:~# /usr/bin/python -V Python 2.4.4If I try to upgrade one of those packages individually with aptitude install shared-mime-info then the below happens: The following packages will be upgraded: gnome-session libgnome2-common libgnomevfs2-common shared-mime-info4 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 795 not upgraded.Need to get 0B/2706kB of archives. After unpacking 1461kB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y Writing extended state information... Error!E: I wasn't able to locate file for the desktop-base package. This might mean you need to manually fix this package.E: Couldn't lock list directory..are you root?You used apt-get to break the desktop-base package behind aptitude's back and that seems to have confused aptitude. I would hope that this problem goes away once you have fixed the desktop-base package.Thanks again for letting me know that it was my mixing apt-get and aptitude that probably screwed me up.I'll look into fixing the desktop-base package. ~c
after much fussing (all with aptitude now -- i'm not mixing in any apt-get commands), I've managed to successfully remove a lot of gnome stuff, but not enough to completely succeed. I've snipped lots of output above this (and in my mind, the gzopen64 thing seems to be key -- it's certainly repeated once for each of these packages that are now still failing)
Processing was halted because there were too many errors. E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) A package failed to install. Trying to recover: Setting up dia-common (0.96.1-6) ... gconftool-2: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2: undefined symbol: gzopen64 dpkg: error processing dia-common (--configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 127 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of dia: dia depends on dia-common (= 0.96.1-6); however: Package dia-common is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing dia (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Setting up metacity-common (1:2.20.1-1) ... gconftool-2: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2: undefined symbol: gzopen64 dpkg: error processing metacity-common (--configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 127 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libmetacity0: libmetacity0 depends on metacity-common (>= 1:2.20); however: Package metacity-common is not configured yet. libmetacity0 depends on metacity-common (<< 1:2.21); however: Package metacity-common is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libmetacity0 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Setting up sun-java5-jre (1.5.0-13-1) ... update-mime-database: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2: undefined symbol: gzopen64 dpkg: error processing sun-java5-jre (--configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 127 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of metacity: metacity depends on libmetacity0 (>= 1:2.19.5); however: Package libmetacity0 is not configured yet. metacity depends on metacity-common (>= 1:2.20); however: Package metacity-common is not configured yet. metacity depends on metacity-common (<< 1:2.21); however: Package metacity-common is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing metacity (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Errors were encountered while processing: dia-common dia metacity-common libmetacity0 sun-java5-jre metacity I feel like I could be close to straightening this out.Is there any way to "zero-out" aptitude's local configuration/cache/state/whatever because I get the sense that there are still potential internal inconsistencies due to my mixing tools (apt-get and aptitude).
thanks again in advance for any thoughts, ~c