On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 11:40 PM, Ken D'Ambrosio <k...@jots.org> wrote: > Hmmm... might be worth looking into. I mean, what's the worst that > happens? I bork my system, and wind up doing a re-install. Which is what > I'm looking at, anyway. So, yeah -- I'll poke around and see what I can > make happen.
I have an idea I've been turning over in my head which may be applicable here, too: Set up another installation in a directory branch. In your case, maybe under "/usr/ubuntu-i386/" or something like that. The reason I want to do this is so I can get certain things from Debian "unstable" to install (with all their library dependencies) without having to run my entire system on unstable.[1] One way to do this would be to bootstrap an installation in a VM or a chroot, but that's a bit heavy-handed. I've been fiddling with using arguments to apt-get/dpkg to change the root directory for that invocation, e.g.: sudo apt-get -o 'RootDir=/usr/unstable' update That problem I have is that I haven't found the magic needed to initialize an apt installation. It rightly complains that its data files are missing, but I don't know any way to create them. With RPM, it's "rpm --initdb". Anyone know how to do it in APT-land? -- Ben [1] For example, Debian "lenny" ships a rather buggy release of Audacious. But installing a backport would require replacing half my system, including libc. Might as well just run unstable as the main system. Building from source requires building a ton of other libraries as well. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/