VVDQ : Alpine on Ubuntu??

[Derek Broughton]

Beartooth Testbedder wrote:

> I went to UW, downloaded a .deb for Alpine 1.0, and tried UW's
> instructions for installing it with "dpkg -i alpine_1.00_i386.deb"
> 
> That got an error message. I chewed on it, to no avail, while I did some
> other stuff

Without the message, there's not much we can do, but I'd suggest that it's
probably partly installed now, and "sudo aptitude -f install" might finish
the job.

> Now I've gotten another error message, while doing something unrelated,
> obviously meant to remind me of the loose end. And I can't make head nor
> tail of it, either :
> 
> root at SblzUb:/home/btth# qtparted &
> [1] 32684
> root at SblzUb:/home/btth# qtparted: cannot connect to X server

Again, you don't really give us enough context, but at a guess I'd say you
have used "su" (evil!) or "sudo -i" to get a root shell, and are now trying
to run qtparted with predictable results.  Use "kdesudo qtparted" from your
_own_ shell (though I think you need to give it a disk name).

> root at SblzUb:/home/btth# apt-get install qtparted

Not necessary...

> Reading package lists...
> Done Building dependency tree... Done
> qtparted is already the newest version. You might want to run `apt-get -f
> install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>   alpine: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.6-6) but 2.3.6-0ubuntu20.5 is to be
>   installed

...As I said.

> Having run Linux since RH7, I'm only too familiar with dependency hells.
> (Maybe Debian has a general solution??)

Yes - it involves never installing packages from unknown repositories using
dpkg.  alpine is in the "universe" repository, and if you used that (by
enabling it in either /etc/apt/sources.list or /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ -
there should be a commented line somewhere), then all the dependencies
would have been resolved.

I recommend "sudo dpkg --purge remove alpine", then "sudo aptitude update"
(after enabling the universe repository), and "sudo aptitude install
alpine".

> 
> But I'm almighty leery of any kind of -f option, let alone an install
> command with no argument. Do I really want to do that?? What does it mean
> by "(or specify a solution)"??

In this case, no you don't want to do that, because you've got a package
that quite possibly isn't compatible with Ubuntu, but it is generally
safe.  -f is "fix", which just means do whatever's necessary to resolve
dependency issues - and it won't do them until it tells you what it wants
and gives you a chance to respond.
-- 
derek