On 2023-05-01 at 21:51, Maureen L Thomas wrote: > Unfortunately I cannot install anything. I used the command line and > the app but neither of them will work.
I suspect that if you don't have the various directories under /var/, you may not be able to use apt or aptitude or synaptic or the like, but dpkg (in the form of 'dpkg -i /path/to/filename.deb') may still work. If it doesn't, the only fallbacks that I can think of that would be *more* likely to work - short of reinstalling Debian, anyway - involve carefully extracting the .deb's contents into the correct root path, and running any necessary follow-on scripts, *by hand*. And that would be daunting even to me, though I understand that it's certainly possible. > I have no idea what to do next. I used su and sudo first. It just > keeps saying it cannot connect with the base from which I get > updates, etc. I used the reinstall on brasero and it just said that > it was up to date. I am so confused. This description seems to suggest that you're using a tool which is trying to download the .deb file from a remote location. Those tools are fairly likely to have problems if the directories under /var/ don't exist. Instead, I suggest that you try: $ su - # dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_12_amd64.deb (Or whatever the version number and architecture of your base-files package may be; that's the oldest one I have on hand myself, from August of 2021. You should probably be able to tab-complete the filename from before the first underscore, but that depends on how your system is set up.) dpkg should, I think, have fewer dependencies on directory structure (et cetera) than anything APT-based will have. It still might not be few *enough*, but it's worth a shot. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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