brscan2

[Karl Auer]

Deliberate top-post...

Don't listen to Liam when he gets like this. He'll be nice again
tomorrow :-)

I am personally completely in favour of blowing things up occasionally.
It's always a learning experience, the colours are nice and you can
warm your hands at the flickering flames afterwards.

Liam is kinda right though - it's best to have a recovery strategy in
place before making dramatic changes to things. It seems unlikely that
you will be able to recover neatly from this, but if you do manage it,
please tell us how!

BTW it is possible to re-install stuff from old releases, especially
LTS releases that are still current. You should be able to get back to
whatever you had before if it was installed the standard way from a
standard repo.

It I were you I would systematically uninstall any packages that I had
"played with", then re-install them. If the damage were too great, or
if the re-installing didn't help, I would reinstall the OS from scratch
(after making sure that I had backed up my data and any special
settings).

Regards, K.

PS: Nearly mid-winter here. I've been out chainsawing firewood. It's
good dry applebox. Tough stuff - not as tough as the greybox we used to
burn when I was a boy, but still one chain every half hour or so. Point
is, chainsawing can be fun and useful too :-)

On Sat, 2020-07-04 at 09:59 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> > In an effort to get the scanner working, I tried adding missing
> > data to
> > the package, brscan. Unfortunately I broke it.
> 
> How do you "add missing data" to a package?
> 
> And why on Earth did you think you could do this, or should do this,
> or that it would be a good idea?
> 
> > Unfortunately brscan2, mfc240ccupswrapper, and mfc240clpr don't
> > have all
> > the data they are supposed to have. In particular 'Section,'
> > 'Priority,'
> > and 'Installed-Size.'
> 
> What  do you mean by this?
> 
> All Ubuntu packages have all the data they need. You cannot add to
> it,
> change it, alter it, edit it or anything else and if you think you
> can
> then you do not understand how Linux software packaging works, and
> you
> need to learn that.
> 
> 
> > dpkg: warning: overriding problem because --force enabled:
> 
> :-o
> 
> You used force?! Why?!
> 
> > Does anyone know what this all means, and better yet how to fix it.
> 
> No, because I have no idea what you did.
> 
> > BTW. /usr/local/Brother was not found due to an error I made
> > placing the
> > install directory tree in the directory data. i.e.
> > data/usr/local/Brother …
> 
> :-o
> 
> You are flailing around without knowing what you are doing, and you
> have corrupted your system software.
> 
> You should never try to alter this stuff without understanding, any
> more than you could try to fix a jet engine while flying a plane.
> 
> > P.S. I've manually removed /data and all it contained.
> 
> Oh my. This just gets worse and worse.
> 
> > Though the files
> > in /var/lib/dpkg/info … are still there. Could they be causing the
> > problem?
> 
> Backup your data. Reformat your computer. Never ever try to over-ride
> the packaging system again. This is not only completely unnecessary,
> it cannot possibly ever work, and you have done the equivalent of
> taking a chainsaw to a running engine, cutting random chunks out
> without understanding, hammering some large nails in, and now are
> confused why it doesn't work. I am amazed it hasn't exploded.
> 
> Format, reinstall, do not play with it again.
> 
> -- 
> Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
> Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
> Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
> UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829
> 053
> 

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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