messed up my cups and lpr driver for Brother mfc5490cn

[Ed]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Mike Bushroe <mbushroe at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was trying to see if ti was possible to get print in reverse order, or
> better yet, software print double sided from gedit. Somehow I managed to get
> the dpkg into an unstable state where I can neither remove nor install the
> lpr package from Brother. So I tried running dselect to see if there were
> some more useful options through the gui, and now it won't install any NEW
> packages either.
>
>
>   The error message when trying to remove it is:
> mike at mike-Satellite-P505:~/Downloads/brother_mfc5490cn$ sudo dpkg
> --force-all -r mfc5490cnlpr
> dpkg: warning: overriding problem because --force enabled:
>  Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should
>  reinstall it before attempting a removal.
> (Reading database ... 351489 files and directories currently installed.)
> Removing mfc5490cnlpr ...
> start: Unknown job: lpd
> dpkg: error processing mfc5490cnlpr (--remove):
>  subprocess installed post-removal script returned error exit status 1
> Errors were encountered while processing:
>  mfc5490cnlpr
>
>
> I am running out of ideas on how to manually remove the remaining files and
> start again, force removal, or force re-install, as none of these has worked
> so far. And of course I no longer have printer access.
>
> Any suggestions? Where do I find or create a more detailed error log to see
> what can be fixed or changed manually?
>
> Mike
> --
> But he lives on in a Horcrux named Siri
>
>
I know this isn't a great help, but:
time to keep config files (or the whole etc directory) under version
control (I like Subversion, others like Git - both will work)

? find / -name mfc5490*  maybe - you need to get your dpkg happy first
- if dpkg is like yum, there will be more logging done in /var/log