Subject: dselect/dpkg problem: install/remove

From: "John Houwen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1996 21:53:42 -0500

I seem to have a similar problem with dselect/dpkg, but not with the 
dpkg-ftp option (haven't gotten that far yet) 

The dselect package has given me problems from the first. I made a 
few errors in my 1st attempt at the CDRom install, but managed to get 
most of the selected packages unpacked & installed.  Where dselect 
hung was on the kernel-source/kernel-headers packages. (where is 
local/binary ??) 

I have tried to remove these packages, but upon running either 
dselect or dpkg I get something along the lines of "Package is in an 
unstable/condititon please re-install before attempting to remove"

As I do not clearly understand the package system yet, I'm afraid to 
simply delete the packages and mess up dpkg's database.  I can't 
install the package, can't re-install the package, and dselect/dpgk 
won't remove it!

Coming from the SlackWare Distribution, I learned how to compile &
install programs using make, so there was no problem using the code 
to create a kernel & boot floppy, which I now use to bring up the 
system.  There are some problems with this too, but that will wait 
for another time.

Can anyone help?

---

From: [email-masked] (Jim Pick)
Date: 8 Aug 1996 01:15:22 GMT

>unstable/condititon please re-install before attempting to remove"

The kernel-image, kernel-source and kernel-package packages have a
bug in the installation scripts.  The prerm and preinst scripts
refer to #! /bin/perl .  Unfortunately, on a virgin Debian 1.1
system, there is no /bin/perl.  The solution is to create a symlink
from /usr/bin/perl to /bin/perl.  Then you should be able to 
de-install and re-install the kernel packages no problem.

- Jim

---

From: Mike Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: 07 Aug 1996 09:26:16 -0500

>>>>> "john" == John Houwen <[email-masked]> writes:
    > I seem to have a similar problem with dselect/dpkg, but not
    > with the dpkg-ftp option (haven't gotten that far yet)

    > The dselect package has given me problems from the first. I
    > made a few errors in my 1st attempt at the CDRom install,
    > but managed to get most of the selected packages unpacked &
    > installed.  Where dselect hung was on the
    > kernel-source/kernel-headers packages. (where is
    > local/binary ??)

[snip]

This sounds like the problem that I'm having.  I installed debian
on a new system and all went well until I tried to use dselect to
install the kernel-source package.  While doing that, dpkg
crashed with a segmentation fault.  So I tried to use dselect to
purge the kernel-source package and again dpkg crashed, this time
leaving me with a hung system.  All I could do was power cycle my
machine since the keyboard was apparently frozen and I could not
log in on any other consoles.  This left me with a bad disk which
I cannot fix because now e2fsck crashes with a segmentation
fault.  It looks like I'm going to have to reformat my hard disk
and reinstall from scratch. :(

I don't have any answers for you, but you are not alone.  I'm
tempted to try a different distribution in hopes of getting a
stable system.

I'll let you know if I come up with any solutions.

Mike

-- 
Michael A. Miller                              [email-masked]
  Nuclear Physics Lab, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  PGP public key at <URL:http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/miller5>

---

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 96 16:46 PDT

> I tried to use dselect to
> fault.

It's not likely that dpkg/dselect put the system in this state on its own.
Things that wedge the system and then make e2fsck not run generally have
to do with the shared library files containing corrupt data. This could
be a problem with the data on the disk, or bad RAM. Probably a re-install
would be a good idea at this point, since the data on the disk is suspect.

We have taken some hits because we were using a brand-new Linux 2.0 kernel,
but this does not sound like one of those.

People get upset when I point at hardware, because of course Windows 95
runs fine on the system and the power-on test passes. However, many people
on this list have found that Linux exercises features of your system that
DOS and Windows don't ever touch. We get a lot of "I really didn't believe
it was hardware but then I fixed the hardware and it got better" email.

I run Debian on 5 different computers without stability problems.

	Thanks

	Bruce

---

From: Mike Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: 09 Aug 1996 18:14:05 -0500

>>>>> "bruce" == Bruce Perens <[email-masked]> writes:
[...]
    > It's not likely that dpkg/dselect put the system in this
    > state on its own.  Things that wedge the system and then
    > make e2fsck not run generally have to do with the shared
    > library files containing corrupt data. This could be a
    > problem with the data on the disk, or bad RAM. Probably a
    > re-install would be a good idea at this point, since the
    > data on the disk is suspect.

I agree with that - the next morning e2fsck was able to fix the
problem with no trouble!  Sounds like hardware to me.  Now all I
have to do is track down the problem.

[...]
    > People get upset when I point at hardware, because of
    > course Windows 95 runs fine...
Of course, the first thing I did when I got my machine was delete
all that windows 95 stuff.  Keeps life simple.