[Techtalk] Debian apt and dpkg help, please

[Maria Blackmore]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2003, Carla Schroder wrote:

> I'm still getting the hang of apt-get and dpkg. I ran apt-get
> dist-upgrade, just to see what would happen.

Hello,

Some of homo sapien's greatest achievements came about like this.

"I wonder what will happen if we do $thing"

Of course, so did some of homo sapien's greatest disasters.

"I wonder what will happen if we turn off this cooling pump ..."

:)

> It massively upgraded KDE, and a few other things.

Did you do "apt-get update" first?

> KDE came through the process with a few glitches, the infamous
> "subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1"
> error.

"something broke"

> The exact error message:

> Errors were encountered while processing:
>  /var/cache/apt/archives/libarts1_1.1.3-0woody1_i386.deb
>  /var/cache/apt/archives/libartsc0_1.1.3-0woody1_i386.deb
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

hum.

Interesting.

> So I tried apt-get -f install, which produced the same error. So I ran
> apt-get clean,

This removes the package cache, was this what you were intending to do?

> then apt-get -f install. This time it downloaded a bunch of new KDE
> packages, to no avail:

Interesting.

Veeeeerry veeeery interesting.

> dpkg: error processing
> /var/cache/apt/archives/libarts1_1.1.3-0woody1_i386.deb (--unpack):
> trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/artscat', which is also in package
> libarts1-bin

hmm

now ... er ... I might be doing something a bit weird here, but my woody
machine doesn't know anything about this package...

What do you have in your sources.list?

>  /var/cache/apt/archives/libarts1_1.1.3-0woody1_i386.deb
>  /var/cache/apt/archives/libartsc0_1.1.3-0woody1_i386.deb

I'm wondering where these two packages came from...

> Googling on these errors returns a lot of people with questions, but
> few with answers. Any bright ideas?

See above for ideas, but I can't say anything for how bright they are :)

Maria