Marc Shapiro wrote: > Today there were 459MB of updates to DL. With /only/ 459MB it can't have been that long since your last upgrade. :-) > I was unable to Ctl-C out of this and closed the xterm and restarted it. If you can't kill a program then simply closing the window is unlikely to kill it either. Next time this happens to you look to see if the process is still running with ps. $ ps -efH | less +/dpkg If a program is still running and you need it to stop then you can send signals its way to kill it. $ kill $PROCESS_ID_NUMBER > I then tried to rerun the above dpkg command, but had to remove > the lock file first. And then check that it actually was killed. I think in your case it was still running. I am not saying it is a good idea to kill dpkg and apt processes this way. But I think that is better than thinking they are killed by closing a window and having them still actually running. > I have run the dpkg command several times, now. > Sometimes I have needed to remove the lock file, and sometimes not. That isn't good. I wonder why you were having such trouble. Perhaps you were running out of virtual memory on your netbook? If so then adding a swap file might help you in the future. Assuming that is the problem and not something else. How much ram do you have? How much virtual memory total (with swap)? > If not, what should I do to get the system back into a stable state? > Since this is a netbook, I don't have a floppy, or CD drive to boot > a rescue disk from, so I really need to be confident that it will > boot up. It is running OK now, but a reboot has me worried. Can you boot from the USB? In that case as a fallback plan I would put together a USB boot of a rescue system such as the debian-installer. The d-i has a rescue mode available. Then in the worst case if you can't boot you can boot to rescue mode and repair your system. Or use a different USB boot system for rescue and repair such as KNOPPIX or whatever. I don't have any great references but lacking anything else you could start looking here: http://wiki.debian.org/BootUsb Bob
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