Thanks for your help, i could deblock 2 machines, now i am stuck with the last one, which is in really bad shape.....
trying the following: yoda:/var/cache/apt/archives# apt-get -f install Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following extra packages will be installed: bc binutils blas1 bsdutils bug console-data console-tools console-tools-libs debconf The following packages will be REMOVED: apt-find communicator-nethelp-46 communicator-spellchk-46 9 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 219 not upgraded. 57 packages not fully installed or removed. Need to get 482kB/10.1MB of archives. After unpacking 1034kB will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Get:1 ftp://tux.u-strasbg.fr potato/main apt 0.3.14 [482kB] Fetched 482kB in 3s (126kB/s) E: Sub-process dpkg-preconfig --apt returned an error code (100) E: Failure running script dpkg-preconfig --apt i tryed to remove all traces of apt to reinstall it, but somehwere i seem to have missed some..... BTW where else as in /var/lib/dpkg/status does dpkg store the installed packages? (i removed all directories of apt, all binaries, set it in /var/lib/dpkg/status to no installed.... but dpkg reported an syntax error in /var/lib/dpkg/status, despite i copyed the status from another non installed package) dpkg --configure -a has enourmous problems, since lots of packages are not configured and make problems.... any hint on what i could try? -- ciao bboett ============================================================== [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://inforezo.u-strasbg.fr/~bboett http://erm1.u-strasbg.fr/~bboett =============================================================== the total amount of intelligence on earth is constant. human population is growing....