Debian: Need help with corrupted dpkg database

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 02:14:01AM -0700, der.hans wrote:
> Am 18. Apr, 2001 schw?zte Shawn T. Rutledge so:
> 
> > No, not really, but whatever you do don't try to upgrade to the latest
> > Woody stuff right now... libc 2.2.1 gets installed and I suspect it was what
> 
> What's the issue with libc 2.2.1? I've just updated several machines today
> that are running woody. So far no probs. I'm hoping it stays that way :).

Many programs would have segfaults, bus errors etc.  I was guessing it
was libc, because some of the things that crashed were X and some were
not; probably just anything that has not been re-linked with the new
libc.  But it could also be some other really common library I guess.
The post-install script also failed to run, which caused the old libc
(2.1.7?) to be left behind as well, but the symlink pointed to the new
one.  Silly me... I thought I'd try to point back to the old one instead,
so I deleted the symlink to 2.2.1 and was going to point it at 2.1.7 - 
doh! without libc, ln cannot run.  Fortunately Gnome happened to be still
running and gmc was able to create a symlink in /usr/local/lib, because
I just happened to have write permission there as a normal user (also
my bad, I suppose).  But, then all the programs that _had_ been relinked
against 2.2.1 wouldn't run with the older one, so for instance I still
couldn't use ln to recreate either symlink.  I was terminally stuck and
had to reinstall, as far as I could tell.  So I moved or copied some 
directories I wanted to keep to a new /bak directory (home, etc, usr, etc.)
and then reinstalled with the potato CD.  I tried to upgrade to woody 
again with apt.  It installs perl 5.6, and then apt also doesn't work 
anymore, and I'm guessing perl incompatibilities are the reason; I forget
what the exact error was.  So I was stuck again.  Tried installing potato
again and then upgrading to Progeny via apt.  Got the same apt problem
again.  Tried burning Progeny CDs so I could boot with them (fortunately
cdrecord didn't have library problems at this point - I had to ftp the
package by hand and install it with dpkg).  I could boot with the Progeny
CD, and then it would bring up X, and then immediately exit out of it and
say "the CD has been unmounted, please reboot".  I tried booting with the
CD - same thing again.  Without the CD - my old kernel came up - obviously
Progeny hadn't done much if anything on my hard drive.  nfsd was down,
but fortunately if I booted with my old kernel, another filesystem that
I usually keep mounted from another system was still mounted; so I made
a tar of /home and backed up some other stuff there, ran fdisk to 
repartition (I wanted to shrink the partition I had reserved for Windows
just in case, because I never use this partition, and might instead only
use it for a DOS filesystem, because I do want to run DosEmu; so 300 megs
is enough instead of 2 gigs).  But repartitioning didn't affect the MBR -
it still loaded my old kernel when I rebooted.  So I booted with a DOS
disk, and fdisked with that and did format c: /s.  _Still_ lilo loaded my
old kernel off the hard drive when I rebooted.  So I booted with DOS again
and did fdisk /mbr.  Finally got it to boot DOS.  So I figured Progeny had
no excuse to be confused about the existence of a previous Linux install,
because it was now quite gone; and tried booting with the Progeny CD again.
Same crap - exited X and asked me to reboot.  I tried taking out my secondary
Matrox G200 in case that got it confused (I've been wanting to try dual-
heading and haven't got around to it yet).  No difference.  So I booted with
the Potato CD and installed only the most minimal installation.  Added
the line to /etc/apt/sources.list to get the Progeny stuff, followed the 
instructions on their web site to upgrade from Potato, and this time it 
worked - no more library problems or anything segfaulting, other than 
Netscape 4.75 which gives me a bus error; and Mozilla, which always has
had its problems so that's no surprise.  So I'm using that for now but
I've got to get some kind of browser running.  I suppose I could try 
Konqueror again but I don't think I want the rest of KDE.

I also left out the episodes (2, one before the great crash and one after)
where I tried to upgrade to the latest Ximian Gnome.  The first time, on
top of woody; the second, on top of Potato.  Even without Woody stuff,
I think Ximian installed a new libc also, which had similar effects.  They
ain't compatible.

Obviously this process was convoluted enough that I forgot some details
so I can't say exactly what the problem was; but I think it's not too hard
to reproduce the fact that if you upgrade from potato to woody + Ximian
right now, there are problems.  (And in that case, the libc is taken from
Woody, not Ximian, because it's newer.)

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
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