Upgrade Issues

[Richard Ibbotson]

Hello there

Hope everyone is looking forward to a good Christmas :)

I've just installed my AMD64 workstation with Ibex 8.10.  Everything 
is more or less fine except for dpkg and apt-get.    After installing 
and running the upgrade I get the following error...

166 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
7 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B/109MB of archives.
After this operation, 508kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Extract templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...
dpkg: error processing passwd (--configure):
 package passwd is not ready for configuration
 cannot configure (current status `triggers-awaited')
Errors were encountered while processing:
 passwd
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

So, I am then told to run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to sort out the 
error.  Which does this...

 sudo dpkg --configure -a
dpkg: ../../src/packages.c:221: process_queue: Assertion `dependtry <= 
4' failed.
Aborted

Also..........

APT Error. Context:
    Running dpkg, 
    [ /usr/bin/dpkg, --status-fd, 3, --configure, passwd ], 
    Sup-process returned error code 1, 
    Error processing passwd : package passwd is not ready for 
configuration.

AND ....

APT Error. Context:
    Running dpkg, 
    [ /usr/bin/dpkg, --status-fd, 3, --configure, -a ], 
    Sub-process exited unexpectedly


So, is there anyone out there who knows how to fix this ?  I could re-
install but it would be better to just fix the bug and move on.  
Perhaps there is a dpkg --force option that might work ?

Regards

-- 
Richard
www.sheflug.org.uk