I have a program, OSCAR, (yes it's all caps, even the command to run
it), that is used to view data from an SD card installed in a CPAP
machine. OSCAR is FOSS, available these days from apneaboard.com. I had
installed version 1.01 before this morning's dist-upgrade, but I knew
that 1.20 had been released, so while tidying things up I decided to
update OSCAR.
However, during the dist-upgrade I had multiple error messages; so many
that I was worried about being able to boot. And some of the error
messages were about OSCAR and not being able to update it. I should add
that getting OSCAR means downloading a .deb or .rpm file; it's not in
the repositories. I downloaded the .deb file for 1.20, but before
installing it I decided to uninstall 1.01 first. At the time I was in
Synaptic, so I searched, and there was 1.01. I selected it and marked
it to be removed, but when I clicked on Apply I got error messages and
the removal failed. Then I tried to unmark it, but that also failed.
It's still sitting in Synaptic, all in red, and marked for removal.
Then I closed Synaptic, which always warns you that the changes you
made will be lost, but I closed it anyway. And then I re-launched
Synaptic, and there was OSCAR, still all in red, marked to be removed.
Finally, I closed Synaptic again, and went to the command line, where I
got:
sudo apt-get remove oscar
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer
required:
<long list of auto-removable packages, not including OSCAR>
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
oscar
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 56 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 9,927 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
dpkg: error processing package oscar (--remove):
package is in a very bad inconsistent state; you should
reinstall it before attempting a removal
dpkg: too many errors, stopping
Errors were encountered while processing:
oscar
Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
So then I decided to just install it, hoping thus to fix whatever was
wrong with it:
sudo apt-get install oscar
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer
required:
<long list of auto-removable packages, not including OSCAR>
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be upgraded:
oscar
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 56 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/3,479 kB of archives.
After this operation, 2,547 kB disk space will be freed.
(Reading database ... 1581526 files and directories currently
installed.) Preparing to unpack
.../oscar_1.1.0-testing-3-3build1_amd64.deb ... rm: cannot remove
'/home/jjj/Desktop/OSCAR.desktop': No such file or directory dpkg:
warning: old oscar package pre-removal script subprocess returned error
exit status 1 dpkg: trying script from the new package instead ...
dpkg: error processing archive
/var/cache/apt/archives/oscar_1.1.0-testing-3-3build1_amd64.deb
(--unpack): there is no script in the new version of the package -
giving up Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/oscar_1.1.0-testing-3-3build1_amd64.deb E:
Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
So I can't install it, I can't remove it, and it's still marked for
removal in Synaptic. And strangely, it launches and runs as it always
has. And what is installed is 1.01, not 1.1.0-testing, which I never
installed or even downloaded. I don't know where apt-get got the notion
that 1.1.0 is what should be installed.
I still have the.deb file for 1.0.1, which I installed with dpkg. I
haven't tried to reinstall it, nor have I tried to install the .deb
file for 1.2.0. I'd prefer to fix whatever's wrong before doing so, but
I've never run into anything like this before.
Suggestions?
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