On Fri, 2007-07-20 at 12:21 +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Fri, 2007-07-20 at 10:06 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
Probably /var/lib/dpkg/info/xcalc.list
Thanks MJR, yes, it is there.
Did your /var get full while installing something? I'd suggest reinstalling xcalc at least.
Yes, now you mention it, I think there was an error come up about xcalc during installation, but, not understanding what it meant I just clicked on the ok button.
I think you will get this error when you try to install anything, including trying to reinstall xcalc.
Yes, all apt-get actions seem to fail.
Best course of action here would be to replace xcalc.list with a known good copy (which I have just emailed to you off list) or at least compare to your copy and make changes as appropriate.
Then I would do a 'sudo apt-get install --reinstall xcalc' just to be sure.
Thanks; I have received and installed your new file and then done an apt-get reinstall. This seemed to work ok but now when I try to apt-get install gramps I get a similar error message as before but this time mentioning a different file is missing it's newline:
(Reading database ... dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/gramps_2.2.6-1ubuntu1_all.deb (--unpack): files list file for package `xcursor-themes' is missing final newline Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/gramps_2.2.6-1ubuntu1_all.deb Processing was halted because there were too many errors. E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
It's either as MJR says, or a disk/filesystem error or the machine was rebooted whilst it was still installing the ubuntu packages or possibly during an update.
I am wondering if it was simply my /var filesystem got full up during installation like MJR suggested (the hard disk I have installed it on is quite small (the / partition is only 3GB)).
When doing a "ls" on /var/lib/dpkg/info to look for the xcalc.list file a few minutes ago I noticed that quite a few files were listed in green instead of black. It appears that these green files are set to permission 755 instead of the normal 644 and are mostly (but not all as some are just .prerm) in sets of four with:
.postinst .postrm .preinst .prerm
suffixes instead of sets of two with:
.list .md5sums
suffixes. 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. I have saved a list of files with the *.p* suffix to a text file but looking at the list can see it contains 392 lines... NOT good news.
I have noticed that Ubuntu keeps telling me there are around 300 packages waiting to be updated online each time it starts up... I have not tried this online update, and haven't got a clue whether or not it would work, but would it be worth a try or would it complicate things? Alternatively I still have the Ubuntu 7.04 "Live CD" from which I originally installed Ubuntu... can I simply copy any files off there onto my hard disk to correct the problem?
Although having a little bit of experience with Linux I haven't much of a clue about Debian/Ubuntu so am unsure of how serious my problem is.
Any suggestions about the best way forward would be appreciated.
sagr.