Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
Hi, Daniel!
On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 08:54:55PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
[ .... ]
> Just to be a little more clear, you can find out exactly what aptitude
> thinks by examining the status flags on the left-hand side of the
> package list. Normally packages have flags like this:
> pi package-name ...
> The two characters on the left say what the current (p) and planned (i)
> states of the package are. "p" here is for "purged" and "i" is for
> "installed". You can find a complete list in the online help; of
> particular interest for you is the "B" state, "broken". I bet that the
> flags on "vim" were something like:
> iB vim ...
> which means that vim is currently installed, and will be broken by the
> current set of planned actions.
Cheers! That's appreciated, because I'm sure I'll remembert this through
the next time I'll be using aptitude, possibly in several months.
> Now more information than you probably want. ;-)
[ snipped, but read with thanks. ]
> > > Is there a reason you're still using sarge?
> > <rant mode>
> > Yes. Installing Debian is (was?) so painful that I really can't face the
> > drudgery again at the moment. I've only had about 2 years use out of
> > sarge so far.
> I'm sorry it was such a pain. (rest of rant snipped)
> > In the real world, nobody I know has got any sort of GNU/Linux
> > installed and working in a few days. Most have tried and given up
> > after a weekend or two, going back to a Microsoft system. Those few
> > who have managed have, like me, endured weeks of drudgery. Only on
> > internet blogs do I read "Wow!" reports about how it works perfectly
> > an hour and a half after inserting the installation DVD.
> Well, my first Debian installation was from a pile of floppies, so I'm
> not going to be able to comment intelligently on how hard or easy today's
> process is.
:-) That appears somewhat evasive. Installing the bootstrap from DVD,
and "installing" the desired set of packages, whether from DVD or over
the internet takes a trivial amount of time - at most an evening. It's
the "little" adjustments which then take weeks - like getting debian to
access USB sticks (though that's probably painless now), or a laser
printer on the parallel port (took me a whole day, including getting an
output filter going).
I suspect there's an Emperor's New Clothes effect here - it takes
_everybody_ weeks to get a GNU/Linux system properly set up, but nobody
(apart from me ;-) has the courage to be the first to admit it. So, how
long did it take you from making that pile of floppies to having a
satisfactory Debian? What units of time would the answer be in, even?
#########################################################################
Anyhow, I've got my aptitude working again, and I'm profoundly grateful
for the help you and others gave me. The essential problem was having
"stable" instead of "sarge" in my sources.list. Sometime or other, I
will be upgrading - maybe to lenny when it comes out rather than etch.
I've tried out a few other distributions (including ubuntu), but didn't
like them much. I even tried out FreeBSD, but it became obvious I'd have
a lot to unlearn and relearn there. So, I'll probably be sticking with
Debian, at least for some while.
There didn't seem to be a python >=2.4 in the sarge repository, so in the
end I downloaded the source code tarball from the python site and built
it myself. (Then I downloaded and built the application I really wanted
which needed this python.)
Again, thanks!
> Daniel
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
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