Hi, Apt-get and dpkg work so well I hardly ever have to think about how they work. Unfortunately, this means I'm pretty clueless when something does go wrong.
I have two computers which apparently have damaged dpkg systems -- the status or package databases seem to be corrupted or destroyed. For example, attempting to run apt-get update results in this error message (after checking for packages data from the Debian site): Reading Package Lists... Error! E: Could not open file /var/lib/dpkg/status - open (2 No such file or directory) E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. (looks like I've made a blunder somewhere along the line!) The other machine constantly sends email to the administrative email address complaining that various packages aren't being found in a database of some kind (I forget what the exact message is). It seems like there ought to be a way to have dpkg do a consistency check/repair of some kind (I though of reinstalling dpkg, but then do I need dpkg to install dpkg?). I'm sure there must be some facility for doing this, but I haven't found anything by just doing searches. Is there a standard way to fix a corrupt dpkg system? The only thing I can think of at this point is to manually backup all the user data areas and reinstall the whole system, but that's pretty painful, so I'd really like to try something less destructive. Thanks, Terry -- ------------------------------------------------------ Terry Hancock [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com P.O. Box 60583 Pasadena, CA 91116-6583 ------------------------------------------------------ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]