Aptitude help
How can I resolve this dependency? Aptitude has given up resolving the dependencies. It appears that linux-kbuild-2-6-28 is not available yet: moe:/tmp/kde-cajun# apt-cache search linux-kbuild linux-kbuild-2.6.26 - Kbuild infrastructure for Linux 2.6.26 So how am I to resolve the dependencies by hand as Aptitude suggests as a solution? Thanks, Mike moe:/tmp/kde-cajun# aptitude install linux-headers-2.6.28-1-all-amd64 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done Reading task descriptions... Done The following packages are BROKEN: linux-headers-2.6.28-1-amd64 The following NEW packages will be installed: linux-headers-2.6.28-1-all-amd64 0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 791kB of archives. After unpacking 10.8MB will be used. The following packages have unmet dependencies: linux-headers-2.6.28-1-amd64: Depends: linux-kbuild-2.6.28 which is a virtual package. Unable to resolve dependencies! Giving up... The following packages are BROKEN: linux-headers-2.6.28-1-amd64 The following NEW packages will be installed: linux-headers-2.6.28-1-all-amd64 0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 791kB of archives. After unpacking 10.8MB will be used. aptitude failed to find a solution to these dependencies. You can solve them yourself by hand or type 'n' to quit. The following packages have unmet dependencies: linux-headers-2.6.28-1-amd64: Depends: linux-kbuild-2.6.28 which is a virtual package. Resolve these dependencies by hand? [N/+/-/_/:/?] n Abort. moe:/tmp/kde-cajun# -- IBM: Incredibly Boring Manuals 18:30:01 up 4:04, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.06, 0.08 Linux Registered User #241685 http://counter.li.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Aptitude help
On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 16:35, M. Lewis ca...@cajuninc.com wrote: How can I resolve this dependency? Aptitude has given up resolving the dependencies. It appears that linux-kbuild-2-6-28 is not available yet: moe:/tmp/kde-cajun# apt-cache search linux-kbuild linux-kbuild-2.6.26 - Kbuild infrastructure for Linux 2.6.26 I did this a while ago for .27, I had to build a kbuild deb myself. However a .27 orig.tar.gz is/was available to build from at http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/debian-kernel/pool/main/l/linux-kbuild-2.6/ I don't know if the same one could be used or modified and used for .28 (I have no idea what is in kbuild) That's all I know on this subject, hope it helps a little. Cheers, Kelly Clowers -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Aptitude help
On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 06:35:56PM -0600, M. Lewis ca...@cajuninc.com was heard to say: How can I resolve this dependency? Aptitude has given up resolving the dependencies. It appears that linux-kbuild-2-6-28 is not available yet: moe:/tmp/kde-cajun# apt-cache search linux-kbuild linux-kbuild-2.6.26 - Kbuild infrastructure for Linux 2.6.26 So how am I to resolve the dependencies by hand as Aptitude suggests as a solution? If the package you're trying to install depends on a package which isn't available, you'll just have to wait until it becomes available. I don't know what the timeline is on that; AFAIK there aren't any 2.6.28 packages anywhere in the archive. In fact, moe:/tmp/kde-cajun# aptitude install linux-headers-2.6.28-1-all-amd64 linux-headers-2.6.28-1-all-amd64 doesn't seem to exist at all in Debian. Maybe you got it from some other site and they can provide you with a matching kbuild? Daniel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Aptitude help
Daniel Burrows wrote: I don't know what the timeline is on that; AFAIK there aren't any 2.6.28 packages anywhere in the archive. In fact, moe:/tmp/kde-cajun# aptitude install linux-headers-2.6.28-1-all-amd64 linux-headers-2.6.28-1-all-amd64 doesn't seem to exist at all in Debian. Maybe you got it from some other site and they can provide you with a matching kbuild? Daniel It's from experimental. -- IBM: Itty Bitty Machines 20:05:01 up 5:39, 2 users, load average: 0.04, 0.06, 0.07 Linux Registered User #241685 http://counter.li.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
Hi, Daniel! On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 09:14:10PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote: On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 03:00:52PM +, Alan Mackenzie [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say: On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 08:54:55PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote: 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. Only in the sense that I don't want to get into a pointless argu^H^H^H^Hdiscussion about the totally subjective question of whether installing Debian is hard for two different people with different skills and requirements (namely you and me), especially when I don't work on the installation system and I can't fix any of your problems for you. OK, fair enough! Moreover, it's been ten years since I installed Debian for the first time and I don't trust my memory to tell me precisely what the conditions were at the time or how long it took me. A few things I do remember having trouble with, like getting basic access to email (which required configuring an MTA), getting X working, and getting a printer hooked up, are so easy nowadays that it's barely worth remarking on them. These all caused me moderate or severe pain with sarge in 2006. Maybe it's only the first debian installation anybody does which is so hard. I hope so! Anyhow, it seems time to finish this thread, now. Thanks for all the comments. Daniel -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
On Monday 23 June 2008 11:00:52 am Alan Mackenzie wrote: 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). FWIW, in 2001 it took me 30 days to get X working from a potato (IIRC) system. In those days, you had to use the terminal naked, in the snow, with out shoes on. Today, it would take me 30 min to install Debian stable, another one two two hours to download all the software I like (complete with two dist-upgrades to testing, then to Sid). X, so far, just works from the install system, selecting the Desktop from the ncurses package load out (or maybe it is X-system, I forget, with Debian, how often do you re-install?) Prior to that, I installed RH and Mandrake, both of which I would badly break with in a week, resulting in a re-load. I learned nothing from it, other then how to break it and how to hate the RPM system. After my first Debian install (and truly that was my first Linux system I used) I learned how Linux worked (or started to learn). As they say, the learning curve is steep IF it does not work as expected out of the box. -- Damon L. Chesser [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linkedin.com/in/dchesser signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:16:00 + (UTC) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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. Glad to hear you got aptitude working again. When I first tried to upgrade from Sarge to Etch (when Etch was still testing), it was a failure, because the change between the two was too great. So, I ended up destroying my system. Perhaps if I had waited until Etch was stable before upgrading from Sarge to Etch, it may have been smoother. I briefly used PCLinuxOS, and then, once Etch was stable, went back to Debian with a new install of it (over PCLOS). Anyway, from my experience, I feel doing such a drastic upgrade may not be smooth. So, I recommend doing a thorough backup first if you attempt an upgrade from Sarge to Lenny. Mark -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 03:00:52PM +, Alan Mackenzie [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say: On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 08:54:55PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote: 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. Only in the sense that I don't want to get into a pointless argu^H^H^H^Hdiscussion about the totally subjective question of whether installing Debian is hard for two different people with different skills and requirements (namely you and me), especially when I don't work on the installation system and I can't fix any of your problems for you. Moreover, it's been ten years since I installed Debian for the first time and I don't trust my memory to tell me precisely what the conditions were at the time or how long it took me. A few things I do remember having trouble with, like getting basic access to email (which required configuring an MTA), getting X working, and getting a printer hooked up, are so easy nowadays that it's barely worth remarking on them. Daniel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
Hi again,
On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 08:47:35PM -0500, Mumia W.. wrote:
On 06/19/2008 02:22 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
Hi, debian!
My system: Debian Sarge, with little alteration other than a kernel
upgrade (to 2.6.8).
I currently have aptitude 0.2.15.9 compiled at Apr 7 2005 13:32:48. I
am having severe problems with it, and have become totally confused.
I start aptitude. This status message appears at the top right of the
screen:
#Broken: 12 Will free 16.7MB of disk space DL Size: 6215kB
[...]
Would somebody please explain what's happened to my system, and how to
fix it. I would like to be able to _just_ install software, in
particular a = 2.4 version of python.
Is there perhaps some command (apt-foo, perhaps??) which could rebuild
the package database on my system?
Is there perhaps a less flexible, easier to use package manager?
aptitude is about as complicated as mutt, but because I only use
aptitude at most a few times a year, I'm never going to get to grips
properly with it.
Thanks in advance for the help!
To know what is going on with your system, we would need to see your
/etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/preferences files.
#/etc/apt/sources.list:
#
deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib
deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib
#
I haven't got an /etc/apt/preferences. However, I can see one problem.
I've got stable where I really want to have sarge. stable points
at the current Debian release, which changes every now and then. This
seems a source of my problems.
The output of this command would also help:
aptitude -sV upgrade
#
[ a few status messages from reading the archive ]
The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
cjk-latex [4.5.1-4 - 4.7.0+cvs20061019-2]
freetype1-tools [1.4pre.20030402-1.1 - 1.4pre.20050518-0.4]
hlatex [0.991-6 - 1.0.1-2.1] hlatex-fonts-base [0.991-2.1 - 1.0-3.1]
libttf2 [1.4pre.20030402-1.1 - 1.4pre.20050518-0.4]
The following packages have been kept back:
a2ps [1:4.13b-4.3 - 1:4.13b.dfsg.1-1]
bsdmainutils [6.0.17 - 6.1.6] bsdutils [1:2.12p-4 - 1:2.12r-19etch1]
[~500 packages kept back]
zlib1g-dev [1:1.2.2-4 - 1:1.2.3-13]
The following packages will be upgraded:
apsfilter [7.2.6-1 - 7.2.6-1.1] base-files [3.1.2 - 4]
[ ~70 packages will be upgraded]
xml-core [0.09 - 0.09-0.1]
The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed:
latex-cjk-all [4.7.0+cvs20061019-2] libcompress-zlib-perl [1.42-2]
libeel2-2.14 [2.14.3-5] libft-perl [1.2-16] libhtml-format-perl [2.04-1]
lsb-base [3.1-23.2etch1] wbritish [6-2] x-ttcidfont-conf [25.1]
99 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 5 to remove and 762 not upgraded.
Need to get 152MB of archives. After unpacking 57.5MB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Would download/install/remove packages.
#
I suspect that your attempt to upgrade python broke your system. If you
are not an expert with Debian, it is best to stick with a single
distribution (e.g. stable) rather than to mix distributions (e.g.
oldstable+stable).
I was expecting that in using a package manager, it would simply do the
Right Thing, without me having to worry. Again, I think the problem for
me is that the meaning of stable has changed from sarge to etch.
Presumably this was a deliberate choice of the Debian team, on the
assumption that most people would be upgrading as early as possible
anyhow. Is there a symbolic link (or something similar) in the Debian
archive, something like sarge - oldstable, that I could use here in
place of stable?
One way to solve this problem would be to modify your
/etc/apt/sources.list to contain only Sarge (oldstable) sources and
update aptitude. Then, using aptitude's interactive interface, remove
those obsolete and locally created packages that seem to depend upon
non-Sarge resources. Anything from obsolete and locally created
packages that seems to be breaking the system should be removed. After
that, confirm that aptitude is happy by doing another aptitude -sV
upgrade. Aptitude should not want to upgrade anything.
I will try this. Thanks!
You need python (= 2.4), and that version exists in Etch--which is why
you wanted to mix distributions, but mixing distributions is a great way
to break a Debian system, so you need backports. See if backports.org
has a suitable version of python for you. If not, consider upgrading to
Etch. As a Sarge user, you are not getting security updates, so you
should probably want to upgrade soon anyway.
Installing Debian is very, very painful, and
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 10:48:02AM +, Alan Mackenzie [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say: On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 08:47:35PM -0500, Mumia W.. wrote: I suspect that your attempt to upgrade python broke your system. If you are not an expert with Debian, it is best to stick with a single distribution (e.g. stable) rather than to mix distributions (e.g. oldstable+stable). I was expecting that in using a package manager, it would simply do the Right Thing, without me having to worry. aptitude prior to 0.4 gets really confused (as do other apt-based package managers) if you try to mix distributions. You can do it, but you have to manually resolve any dependency problems that come up because the package manager doesn't know how. I think that 0.4 should be better, but I don't normally use it this way. Again, I think the problem for me is that the meaning of stable has changed from sarge to etch. Presumably this was a deliberate choice of the Debian team, on the assumption that most people would be upgrading as early as possible anyhow. Is there a symbolic link (or something similar) in the Debian archive, something like sarge - oldstable, that I could use here in place of stable? There is not a symbolic link from sarge to oldstable, because that would be a symlink loop. :-) Release status names, like stable and testing, are symlinks to release names, like sarge and etch; they exist for the convenience of people who want to always have whatever is currently stable or testing. If for some reason you really want to keep using sarge, you should change stable to sarge in sources.list. Personally, I'd recommend upgrading to etch unless you have a situation that prevents that (e.g., you have a low-powered computer that you know can't run etch). Daniel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
Hi, Daniel! On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 07:57:45PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote: On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 07:22:24PM +, Alan Mackenzie [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say: #Broken: 12 Will free 16.7MB of disk space DL Size: 6215kB . Using the aptitude command `find broken', it reports, amongst others, vim as being broken, giving as further details: * vim depends on libc6 (= 2.3.6-6) * vim depends on libncurses5 (= 5.4-5) * vim depends on vim-runtime (= 1:7.0-122+1etch3) However, vim works just fine (I'm using it to write this email). First possible problem: aptitude uses broken as a shorthand for broken *after I apply what you've told me to do*. Ah! Thanks! [ ] # So, I try to update aptitude itself (this will surely help me with my other problems ;-). To begin with, I start aptitude, and type : on each of the 8 lines (--- Security Updates, ., --- Tasks) in the hope of clearing out dross. btw, to upgrade just aptitude it might be easier to run aptitude install aptitude. OK. But I'm a coward. Where in all the documentation would I find a statement that doing this won't irreversibly hose my system, especially when I'm scared that it's already in a fragile, possibly inconsistent state? What, exactly, does install mean? These aren't rhetorical questions. I've looked in the aptitude man page (sarge version from 2005). This is something I dislike about package managers - they demand complete trust on an all-or-nothing basis. Or have I missed something? What I would like is test-download facility that would prompt me for a directory, and put the new version of the package there WITHOUT TOUCHING MY CURRENT SETUP. I could then make sure it works properly before committing myself to an irreversible and potentially catastrophic update. I now find aptitude in the list (Successively CRing Upgradeable Packages, Admin, Main, Aptitude). It gives a list of dependencies, but doesn't say whether it is the current aptitude (0.2.15.9) or the newest one (0.4.4-4) which so depends. Which is it? Several of these are shaded red. The one shown by default is the default candidate version (the version number on the far right). If you pick a particular version, that one is shown. OK. I type u, and it tells me it's connecting to several hosts (presumably to ask them if they're awake), and then that it's downloaded 0B in 21s at 0B/s. Is this an error message, or an expected status message? What is it trying to download here? When you hit u, aptitude checks for updates to the list of available package versions. It doesn't download anything if there aren't any changes. OK. [ ] 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 started installing sarge in earnest the day after my old PC died. After 20 days of work (when I didn't have a day job) I was finally able to use it reasonably. I have kept a detailed log of the process so that it won't be as bad second time round, but even so I'm not looking forward to it. I hit problem after problem after problem - nothing big or dramatic, but each one took 2 to 4 hours to resolve, first tracking down the relevant documentation, trying it out, sometimes with new kernel parameters, sometimes even rebuilding the kernel. To be fair, not all the problems were with Debian; it took a few days to determine that my ISP wouldn't connect to my modem at 56kbaud, but was fine at 33kbaud. A typical problem was that my X-Windows came up in 800 x 600 resolution - not nice on a 17 CRT. It took an evening to search through the many documentation sources, some of them not in easily searchable form, to track down /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, make the appropriate adjustment and test it. When I (finally) got a DSL connection, it took me 7 days of evenings to get my Ethernet card working. There doesn't seem to be a HOWTO for network configuration. When something networky is not worky, typically nothing happens, and one has to wade through /var/log/messages and friends. On the rare occasions an error message does appear, it's something like No route to www.debian.org rather than the more helpful Couldn't read file /etc/resolv.conf. 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. /rant mode [ ] Would somebody please explain what's happened to my system, and how to fix it. I would like to be able to _just_ install
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
Hi, again! On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 10:48:02AM +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: To know what is going on with your system, we would need to see your /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/preferences files. #/etc/apt/sources.list: # deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib # [ ] Hmm. I don't really feel that it was me that did the mixing. :-) However, I take the point. I'll try the suggestion you gave me up above (putting oldstable into sources.list), and then report on what happened. My /etc/apt/source.list now looks like this: # #deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ oldstable main contrib #deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ oldstable main contrib deb http://security.debian.org/ oldstable/updates main contrib # When I now start aptitude, I get a plethora of errors with the following form: W: Couldn't stat source package list ftp://ftp.de.debian.org oldstable/main Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.de.debian.org_debian_dists_oldstable_main_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory) It seems I've misunderstood the format of /etc/apt/sources.list. Looking at source.lists's man page, however, it seems OK. If I connect to the ftp server in the error message, ftp.de.debian.org, then cd to debian/dists, I see this: lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 5 Apr 12 21:15 Debian3.1r8 - sarge lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 4 Feb 16 20:51 Debian4.0r3 - etch -rw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 449 Apr 12 18:16 README drwxr-xr-x 5 ftp ftp 4096 Feb 16 14:58 etch drwxr-xr-x 5 ftp ftp78 Jun 20 08:23 etch-m68k drwxr-xr-x 5 ftp ftp 69632 Jun 20 08:22 etch-proposed-updates drwxr-xr-x 5 ftp ftp78 Jun 20 08:24 experimental drwxr-xr-x 17 ftp ftp 4096 Jun 20 08:23 lenny drwxr-xr-x 5 ftp ftp78 Jun 20 08:23 lenny-proposed-updates lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 5 Apr 8 2007 oldstable - sarge lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp22 May 15 2007 oldstable-proposed-updates - sarge-proposed-updates lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp21 Apr 8 2007 proposed-updates - etch-proposed-updates drwxr-xr-x 5 ftp ftp 4096 Apr 12 19:08 sarge drwxr-xr-x 5 ftp ftp78 Jun 20 08:22 sarge-proposed-updates drwxr-xr-x 19 ftp ftp 4096 Jun 20 08:24 sid lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 4 Apr 8 2007 stable - etch lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp21 Apr 8 2007 stable-proposed-updates - etch-proposed-updates lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 5 Apr 8 2007 testing - lenny lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp22 Apr 8 2007 testing-proposed-updates - lenny-proposed-updates lrw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 3 May 13 2006 unstable - sid Here, stable - etch and oldstable - sarge seem to be of equal status. This is making me feel stupid; what stupid mistake have I made in my source.list? -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
Alan Mackenzie escreveu: Hi, again! On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 10:48:02AM +, Alan Mackenzie wrote: To know what is going on with your system, we would need to see your /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/preferences files. #/etc/apt/sources.list: # deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib # [ ] Hmm. I don't really feel that it was me that did the mixing. :-) However, I take the point. I'll try the suggestion you gave me up above (putting oldstable into sources.list), and then report on what happened. My /etc/apt/source.list now looks like this: # #deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ oldstable main contrib #deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ oldstable main contrib deb http://security.debian.org/ oldstable/updates main contrib # When I now start aptitude, I get a plethora of errors with the following form: W: Couldn't stat source package list ftp://ftp.de.debian.org oldstable/main Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.de.debian.org_debian_dists_oldstable_main_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory) [...] Here, stable - etch and oldstable - sarge seem to be of equal status. This is making me feel stupid; what stupid mistake have I made in my source.list? None, I'd say. Have you run aptitude update? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
Hi, Eduardo! On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 01:40:55PM -0300, Eduardo M KALINOWSKI wrote: Alan Mackenzie escreveu: My /etc/apt/source.list now looks like this: # #deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ oldstable main contrib #deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ oldstable main contrib deb http://security.debian.org/ oldstable/updates main contrib # When I now start aptitude, I get a plethora of errors with the following form: W: Couldn't stat source package list ftp://ftp.de.debian.org oldstable/main Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.de.debian.org_debian_dists_oldstable_main_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory) [...] Here, stable - etch and oldstable - sarge seem to be of equal status. This is making me feel stupid; what stupid mistake have I made in my source.list? None, I'd say. Have you run aptitude update? I have now! I think I understand the error message now - it parses as couldn't stat [the] source package list [for] ftp://ftp.de.debian.org oldstable/main ['s] Packages [, which should be on your Debian system at] (/var/lib/._Packages). I'd read the message as meaning that /var/lib/apt/...-i386-Packages couldn't be found on ftp.de.debian.org - the first part of the message creates that mental context. And the last bit of the message (which I didn't quote above) which said something like You may want to update the package lists. was not referring to the contents of the file /etc/apt/source.list (which I thought at first), is certainly not talking about a package called lists, but actually means You may want to run the `update' command in aptitude.. Phew! After running the update command, I now have a sanely working aptitude again. Thanks! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 02:44:58PM +, Alan Mackenzie [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say: On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 07:57:45PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote: On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 07:22:24PM +, Alan Mackenzie [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say: #Broken: 12 Will free 16.7MB of disk space DL Size: 6215kB . Using the aptitude command `find broken', it reports, amongst others, vim as being broken, giving as further details: * vim depends on libc6 (= 2.3.6-6) * vim depends on libncurses5 (= 5.4-5) * vim depends on vim-runtime (= 1:7.0-122+1etch3) However, vim works just fine (I'm using it to write this email). First possible problem: aptitude uses broken as a shorthand for broken *after I apply what you've told me to do*. Ah! Thanks! 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. [ ] # So, I try to update aptitude itself (this will surely help me with my other problems ;-). To begin with, I start aptitude, and type : on each of the 8 lines (--- Security Updates, ., --- Tasks) in the hope of clearing out dross. btw, to upgrade just aptitude it might be easier to run aptitude install aptitude. OK. But I'm a coward. Where in all the documentation would I find a statement that doing this won't irreversibly hose my system, especially when I'm scared that it's already in a fragile, possibly inconsistent state? I don't know if it's explicitly stated, but aptitude prompts if it has to take any actions that you didn't ask for. But if you don't trust it (and I couldn't blame you at this point), you can always run it as a non-root user and pass the -s flag to see what it would do. What, exactly, does install mean? install means install the current candidate version of the package. It doesn't do anything else (other pending actions stored in the state file are ignored). Now more information than you probably want. ;-) In the apt universe, there are three main versions of a package: the current version, which is currently installed, the candidate version, which is what would be installed if you asked for a package, and the install version, the version that is going to be installed by any pending action. Normally the install version is either the current or the candidate version. In other words, you might have something like current version candidate version other versions aptitude 0.2.15.3 0.4.4 0.4.11.5, 0.5.0 ^ | | install version The candidate version, btw, is chosen according to your current local policy and preferences (see apt_preferences(5)). Installing aptitude, in apt lingo, would mean changing the install to point at version 0.4.4. Once the install was complete, both the current and the candidate version would be 0.4.4. (I hope that's right, because it's the mental model I use. :-) ) These aren't rhetorical questions. I've looked in the aptitude man page (sarge version from 2005). This is something I dislike about package managers - they demand complete trust on an all-or-nothing basis. Or have I missed something? What I would like is test-download facility that would prompt me for a directory, and put the new version of the package there WITHOUT TOUCHING MY CURRENT SETUP. I could then make sure it works properly before committing myself to an irreversible and potentially catastrophic update. There are a couple things you could try: (a) set up a chroot and install the new aptitude there to convince yourself it works. (b) use a checkpointing facility if your filesystem supports it. e.g., if you have free extents you can run lvcreate --snapshot. I don't think these are very practical, though. There isn't really a good way to install packages into custom locations, though, or to roll back entire systems (other than LVM snapshots, which I should add I've never actually used). My personal experience, though, is that the Debian package management tools are very reliable and provide ample opportunities to recover the situation on the occasions that something does go wrong. Is there a reason you're still using sarge? rant mode Yes. Installing
Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
Hi, debian! My system: Debian Sarge, with little alteration other than a kernel upgrade (to 2.6.8). I currently have aptitude 0.2.15.9 compiled at Apr 7 2005 13:32:48. I am having severe problems with it, and have become totally confused. I start aptitude. This status message appears at the top right of the screen: #Broken: 12 Will free 16.7MB of disk space DL Size: 6215kB . Using the aptitude command `find broken', it reports, amongst others, vim as being broken, giving as further details: * vim depends on libc6 (= 2.3.6-6) * vim depends on libncurses5 (= 5.4-5) * vim depends on vim-runtime (= 1:7.0-122+1etch3) However, vim works just fine (I'm using it to write this email). # So, I try to update aptitude itself (this will surely help me with my other problems ;-). To begin with, I start aptitude, and type : on each of the 8 lines (--- Security Updates, ., --- Tasks) in the hope of clearing out dross. I now find aptitude in the list (Successively CRing Upgradeable Packages, Admin, Main, Aptitude). It gives a list of dependencies, but doesn't say whether it is the current aptitude (0.2.15.9) or the newest one (0.4.4-4) which so depends. Which is it? Several of these are shaded red. I type u, and it tells me it's connecting to several hosts (presumably to ask them if they're awake), and then that it's downloaded 0B in 21s at 0B/s. Is this an error message, or an expected status message? What is it trying to download here? I now type g, and the heavens open. In the top half of the screen I get the message: --/ Packages being removed because they are no longer used: followed by a frighteningly large list (about two hundred) packages shaded purple. If this sentence were to be reformulated with the second verb active, e.g. Packages being removed because X no longer uses them, what would X be?. Then --/ Packages being installed to satisfy dependencies followed by 20 package names (such as cupsys-common, libgnutls13), then --/ Packages being deleted due to unsatisfied dependencies followed by an even frighteninglyier large list (~400 packages, including many libraries). Lower down there is a list of 70 or 80 packages to be updated. At this point, I type q to quit, for fear of utterly fubarring my system, and in a state of high confusion. # OK, my system works. Nothing I do on my Debian box from day to day seems affected by any of the alleged dependency problems. To be honest, I don't really believe aptitude's assertions of brokenness. How did I get into this state? I tried several months ago to upgrade python (which I was trying again today), and all this happened. I don't seem to be able to clear this dross out of my aptitude status. Where are the files which record all these things? (There's no mention on the aptitude man page or the reference manual.) The u command doesn't help here. It downloads 0 bytes in 21s, again, and doesn't appear to do anything. Would somebody please explain what's happened to my system, and how to fix it. I would like to be able to _just_ install software, in particular a = 2.4 version of python. Is there perhaps some command (apt-foo, perhaps??) which could rebuild the package database on my system? Is there perhaps a less flexible, easier to use package manager? aptitude is about as complicated as mutt, but because I only use aptitude at most a few times a year, I'm never going to get to grips properly with it. Thanks in advance for the help! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 07:22:24PM +, Alan Mackenzie [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say: #Broken: 12 Will free 16.7MB of disk space DL Size: 6215kB . Using the aptitude command `find broken', it reports, amongst others, vim as being broken, giving as further details: * vim depends on libc6 (= 2.3.6-6) * vim depends on libncurses5 (= 5.4-5) * vim depends on vim-runtime (= 1:7.0-122+1etch3) However, vim works just fine (I'm using it to write this email). First possible problem: aptitude uses broken as a shorthand for broken *after I apply what you've told me to do*. Presumably canceling the pending actions (e.g., via Actions - Cancel pending actions) would drop this number to 0 (but you can't because your aptitude is too old). The fact that aptitude says it wants to download some packages and change how much is installed also suggests you have some changes to your system queued up. I'm confused by those dependencies, though, because the version of vim in sarge depends on libc6 = 2.3.2.ds1-21 -- good thing, too, since the version of libc6 in sarge is 2.3.2.ds1-22sarge6. Whatever vim aptitude is looking at is not installable on sarge, presumably because you have other releases in your sources.list and told aptitude to install vim from one of them. More on that later. # So, I try to update aptitude itself (this will surely help me with my other problems ;-). To begin with, I start aptitude, and type : on each of the 8 lines (--- Security Updates, ., --- Tasks) in the hope of clearing out dross. btw, to upgrade just aptitude it might be easier to run aptitude install aptitude. I now find aptitude in the list (Successively CRing Upgradeable Packages, Admin, Main, Aptitude). It gives a list of dependencies, but doesn't say whether it is the current aptitude (0.2.15.9) or the newest one (0.4.4-4) which so depends. Which is it? Several of these are shaded red. The one shown by default is the default candidate version (the version number on the far right). If you pick a particular version, that one is shown. I type u, and it tells me it's connecting to several hosts (presumably to ask them if they're awake), and then that it's downloaded 0B in 21s at 0B/s. Is this an error message, or an expected status message? What is it trying to download here? When you hit u, aptitude checks for updates to the list of available package versions. It doesn't download anything if there aren't any changes. I now type g, and the heavens open. In the top half of the screen I get the message: --/ Packages being removed because they are no longer used: followed by a frighteningly large list (about two hundred) packages shaded purple. If this sentence were to be reformulated with the second verb active, e.g. Packages being removed because X no longer uses them, what would X be?. Then If you highlight various packages it should say what depends on them; I might guess that they have to do with the packages being removed later. I can't guess why the packages are being removed since you didn't say what they are -- are they things you need or just libraries that nothing depends on? --/ Packages being installed to satisfy dependencies followed by 20 package names (such as cupsys-common, libgnutls13), then --/ Packages being deleted due to unsatisfied dependencies followed by an even frighteninglyier large list (~400 packages, including many libraries). Lower down there is a list of 70 or 80 packages to be updated. Same as above, highlighting the package will give you some sort of information about why aptitude thinks they might be broken. You could also try canceling all these removals and seeing what aptitude tells you is broken then. Without more information I can't really tell you why these packages are being removed (and this version of aptitude uses the apt resolver, which doesn't provide very detailed information about what's happening). How did I get into this state? I tried several months ago to upgrade python (which I was trying again today), and all this happened. It's hard to say without more information; e.g., which packages are being removed and why. I don't seem to be able to clear this dross out of my aptitude status. Where are the files which record all these things? (There's no mention on the aptitude man page or the reference manual.) The u command doesn't help here. It downloads 0 bytes in 21s, again, and doesn't appear to do anything. Is there a reason you're still using sarge? If you had the etch version of aptitude you could use Cancel pending actions or aptitude keep-all to throw out those actions out. You can also remove /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates, but I don't recommend that except as a last-ditch measure, as doing so will erase all information about which packages have been automatically
Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!
On 06/19/2008 02:22 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, debian! My system: Debian Sarge, with little alteration other than a kernel upgrade (to 2.6.8). I currently have aptitude 0.2.15.9 compiled at Apr 7 2005 13:32:48. I am having severe problems with it, and have become totally confused. I start aptitude. This status message appears at the top right of the screen: #Broken: 12 Will free 16.7MB of disk space DL Size: 6215kB [...] Would somebody please explain what's happened to my system, and how to fix it. I would like to be able to _just_ install software, in particular a = 2.4 version of python. Is there perhaps some command (apt-foo, perhaps??) which could rebuild the package database on my system? Is there perhaps a less flexible, easier to use package manager? aptitude is about as complicated as mutt, but because I only use aptitude at most a few times a year, I'm never going to get to grips properly with it. Thanks in advance for the help! To know what is going on with your system, we would need to see your /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/preferences files. The output of this command would also help: aptitude -sV upgrade I suspect that your attempt to upgrade python broke your system. If you are not an expert with Debian, it is best to stick with a single distribution (e.g. stable) rather than to mix distributions (e.g. oldstable+stable). One way to solve this problem would be to modify your /etc/apt/sources.list to contain only Sarge (oldstable) sources and update aptitude. Then, using aptitude's interactive interface, remove those obsolete and locally created packages that seem to depend upon non-Sarge resources. Anything from obsolete and locally created packages that seems to be breaking the system should be removed. After that, confirm that aptitude is happy by doing another aptitude -sV upgrade. Aptitude should not want to upgrade anything. You need python (= 2.4), and that version exists in Etch--which is why you wanted to mix distributions, but mixing distributions is a great way to break a Debian system, so you need backports. See if backports.org has a suitable version of python for you. If not, consider upgrading to Etch. As a Sarge user, you are not getting security updates, so you should probably want to upgrade soon anyway. BTW, by mixing distributions, you would have problems regardless of which package manager you used. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
