Subject: dpkg freezes system

From: "Michael A. Miller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 14:25:56 -0500

Dear Debian Users,

I've recently installed debian linux on my portable and have run
into a problem with dpkg.  

First, some background.  I don't have access to an up and running
linux machine, except for one with minimal disk space.  I used
that to make floppies for a base installation.  Then I put my zip
drive on a mac with an ethernet card and ftp-ed the most of the
debian installation from my our mirror (most means Packages.gz
and the directories admin, base, comm, devel, doc, editors, mail,
math, misc, net, news, shells, sound, tex, text, and x11) I
ftp-ed these to a dos formatted zip disks.  

Next, I reformatted my hard drive with three partitions: one for
linux, one for linux swap and one a 200 Mb dos partition.  Then,
I booted DOS from a floppy that included drivers for my adaptec
pcmcia scsi card, and I copied everything from the zip disks to
the dos partition on the hard drive.  

After that, I rebooted with the linux boot floppy and went
through the installation procedure.  Up to this point all was
great.  I had a working base installation and I could boot linux
from my hard drive.  When running dselect, all seemed to be ok,
but I couldn't seem to install anything, even when dselect told
me it had installed things.  So, I looked at the debian .deb
files on the msdos partition.  Because they were copied from a
mac to a dos formatted disk, they all had names like
`!acct_62.-0d'.  To simplify dealing with them from bash, I wrote
a script that removed the `!' from the filenames.  Still, dselect
didn't seem to be able to find them, so I started using dpkg by
itself.  This worked great, until I started trying to install
xlib and emacs.  Now dselect tells me that they are both half
installed and need to be reconfigured.  When I run dpkg to
reinstall them, dpkg freezes my machine.

Any ideas?

Regards, Mike