Re: Borked update

From: Martin J. Hillyer (mlhillyer_at_comcast.net)
Date: 03/31/04

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    Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 23:21:36 -0800
To: Debian User List <debian-user@lists.debian.org>

    On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 02:12:36PM +0800, Katipo wrote:
    > Martin J. Hillyer wrote:
    >
    > >After a small fling with Gnome, and trying to remove it, I'm having
    > >trouble getting my system updated. I've been flailing around a fair
    > >bit, so a reinstall may be my only option at this point. But perhaps
    > >someone here could show me a way to avoid that. I was running
    > >unstable, and got this problem; downgrading to testing didn't make the
    > >problem go away.
    > >

    [much of original message snipped...]

    > Hello Martin,
    >
    > Looks as though we are in the same boat, so lets get something going here.
    > I'm in the process of stripping down Gnome 2.4, and it is a minefield of
    > interdependencies.
    > I know that nautilus-media and the nautilus package are dependent, so if
    > you install the package nautilus that may help with nautilus-media.
    > I've purged both nautilus and nautilus-media so far, If I need that type
    > of file manager, gmc will do it, and there are better multimedia
    > packages than nautilus-media.
    >
    > The only other thing that I have been able to glean so far, as I've just
    > started, is the gnome dependency on libgnome2-perl.
    >
    > For the rest, the impression is the problem is with debconf, from the
    > downgrade.
    > Have you tried a reinstall of debconf testing?
    > Regards,
    >
    > David.
    >

    That turned out to be a great hint! I used dselect to install
    nautilus, it installed, upgraded nautilus-media and all the other
    packages that were pending and left me with a package system that has
    no broken installs (dpkg -C now comes up with nothing). Both debconf
    and perl seem to be OK. I used dselect because the previous problems
    were causing aptitude to lose its database and hang, meaning I had to
    kill it from another console.

    One thing I did see - when I rebooted my machine (it's dual-boot and I
    needed to print some photos on a USB dye-sub printer), fsck told me
    that my /usr partition had duplicate/bad inodes and to run fsck
    manually. When I did, answering 'y' to all questions, there are in
    /usr/lost+found 29 files with names like #128268. These appear to be
    perl scripts (I don't know perl). But I've not noticed any ill
    effects from this, and the output of dpkg -l perl* is exactly as
    before. I assume these files are copies of the duplicate inodes and the
    originals are still in place?

    I'm planning to try and purge more gnome tomorrow - I need to get some
    sleep after last night's struggles :-). I'll keep you informed as to
    progress (or regress) - offline, I guess. 

    -- 
Martin Hillyer 
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