[Techtalk] dpkg error -subprocess paste killed by signal

[Carla Schroder]

Okay debian deities, here's your big chance to show off. what the heck is 
going on here? A quick Googling on "subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken 
pipe)" returns zillions of hits, on all different kinds of failed 
installations, but not much that is useful to me. I'm just an old country 
sysadmin, dammit, not a ace kernel hacker.

This all started with upgrading KDE 3.05 to 3.1 on Libranet Debian 2.7. 
Everything else went smoothly, these two packages are stubbornly resisting, 
libarts1 libartsc0. I tried moving /usr/bin/artscat and /usr/bin/artsdsp out 
of the way, what the heck it was worth a try. Made no difference. Initial 
commands were apt-get upgrade <package>. That's when this dpkg error first 
appeared. I resorted to apt-get -f install, trusting in Debian's magical 
abilities to make things go. Well that didn't work. ;-)

I won't bore you with ranting about how installing a single KDE app leads to 
this huge ugly winderz-type interdepency mess. I didn't want to upgrade, I 
just wanted Quanta. 

So- any bright ideas?

Thanks!
Carla


# apt-get -f install
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libarts1 libartsc0
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libartsc0
1 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 172  not upgraded.
8 packages not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 889kB of archives. After unpacking 946kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://download.kde.org stable/main libarts1 1.1.0-0woody4 [846kB]
Get:2 http://download.kde.org stable/main libartsc0 1.1.0-0woody4 [43.2kB]
Fetched 889kB in 21s (40.6kB/s)
(Reading database ... 147934 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace libarts1 1.0.5a-0woody1 (using 
.../libarts1_1.1.0-0woody4_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libarts1 ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libarts1_1.1.0-0woody4_i386.deb 
(--unpack):
 trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/artscat', which is also in package libarts1-bin
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Unpacking libartsc0 (from .../libartsc0_1.1.0-0woody4_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing 
/var/cache/apt/archives/libartsc0_1.1.0-0woody4_i386.deb (--unpack):
 trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/artsdsp', which is also in package libarts1-bin
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libarts1_1.1.0-0woody4_i386.deb
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libartsc0_1.1.0-0woody4_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla Schroder
www.tuxcomputing.com
this message brought to you
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