[ubuntu-uk] Stuff appearing in Terminal, I dont know what it is......

Grant Sewell dcglug at thymox.co.uk
Sun Mar 6 14:50:29 UTC 2011


On Sun, 06 Mar 2011 14:34:28 +0000
John MM wrote:

> Ok, to cap, I had an error this morning, and was advised to delete my 
> /var/lib/dpkg/status, which I did. Problem is, it left with me a
> worse error, and me being unable to update anything. Suffice to say,
> I now have an error saying 'InstallArchives failed' with 141 updates
> in the Update manaer, and no way of updating, Anybody know why that
> should be?

Unfortunately /var/lib/dpkg/status is quite an important file and (as
far as I am aware) there is no real way to re-generate it.  Essentially
it holds details of each package that's installed, and those that have
been installed and removed (but not purged), etc, etc.

You may be able to get back to a semi-usable system is the
file /var/lib/dpkg/status-old is still present - it is (obviously) an
older version of the file so it may not be completely up to date, but
if you duplicate that you *should* get a usable system.

Rule #1: Unless *you* are 100% certain on what you are doing, never
*delete* a file on your system that someone else tells you to delete.
Renaming the file is almost always good enough, and at least if you
rename it you have a chance of renaming it back again.

So, try this:
$ sudo cp /var/lib/dpkg/status-old /var/lib/dpkg/status

Grant.



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