[ALUG] Ubuntu 7.04 apt-get error when installing packages

[Wayne Stallwood]

On Sat, 2007-07-21 at 08:02 +0100, sagr wrote:
> The question is what to do now.  My PC starts and runs ok,
> and, indeed, if I had not tried to do an apt-get I would be completely
> unaware anything is wrong.  Unfortunately this PC is rather slow
> (300MHz) with only 128MB RAM and took ages (nearly 4 hours?) to
> install
> Ubuntu and I have been happily typing away extensively personalising
> it
> since then.  I am therefore a bit reluctant to reinstall everything
> from
> scratch.

To be honest I think you are better starting again with a more slimline
distribution, everything will work with a broken package database right
up until the point you want to install something (with either apt or
dpkg) or install security updates etc. You can continue to repair as MJR
has suggested but if it was caused by a disk space issue during the
installation and given how many packages sit alphabetically after
xcursor-themes.list on a default ubuntu installation you may be there
some time with your pen and paper.

Or you may get lucky and xcursor-themes.list is the last truncated file.
There may be a log of some use in /var/log/installer that will show
exactly which package installations failed during the installation, this
would help you assess whether it is worth continuing the route of
replacing the damaged files.

Part of the problem here is that Ubuntu as you may have noticed has no
package installation options during installation so you don't so much
get a minimal system as a "default desktop" one which if you are looking
at a single purpose machine is overkill. Ubuntu is designed to give you
a pretty functional desktop computer (complete with gimp, Open Office,
web browsers, Email clients etc) from the outset.

As others have suggested you could look at versions of Ubuntu that have
a more lightweight window manager (as with a single purpose computer the
window manager is inconsequential anyway) you can add xubuntu to that
list, but they are mostly all going to still be bloated in terms of the
number of packages installed. Either that or it is time to look at
Debian although the installation in terms of hardware detection is not
as automated or user friendly (IMO)