Hi, all. I am a more or less experienced debian user, and I want to share this with you;
I went through a few "minor" problems, when I recently decided that I had scr*wed up my system(Potato) and it was time for a reinstall. I reinstalled from a set of Slink CDs, and proceeded to do an apt-get update and an apt-get dist-upgrade from the nearest mirror. this upgrade went wrong with the following error; (or something similar) Removing bash; Installing libreadlineg2; Confing libreadlineg2; Installing bash; error; cannot execute bla-bla-bla; no such file or directory; Now bash was gone, and I had no idea how to fix it, except for changing shell to tcsh, (and that's no workaround). I suspected that the mirror was broken or in the process of an update, so I reinstalled and tried 5 other mirrors, and it went exactly the same way every time, even if I tried to upgrade with dselect. At this point I was ready for a mental institution! (&:o$) I now suspected that something was wrong with the new bash and libreadlineg2, so I reinstalled, put them on hold in dselect, and upgraded with dselect. This time everything went smooth, except for a minor error, where I had to kill cron manually to install a newer version of cron (or something else). Now I had a working system, and thought of looking at this mailinglist, and I could see from other mails on this list, that others have had the same problem. Someone suggested to use ash instead when bash is gone(thanks, pal!), and I found this to be a valid workaround; (still with bash and libreadlineg2 on hold) install ash with dselect or maybe apt-get (I used dselect) now select bash and libreadline for upgrading, and (try to) install. When the error occurs, quit dselect and do; cd /bin ln -s ash sh start dselect again and install, and bash gets installed, and your system is O.K. again. (and all packages are up-to-date) If you have already had this error and you don't have ash installed, I don't know how to get it working again. Maybe with a manual install of ash from a tar.gz? I have not been able to find a homepage or anything similar for ash, not even on the NetBSD site, does anyone know where to get a gzipped tarball with ash, so one can install ash manually ? Regards Jens C. Denmark