On Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 01:02:25PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > > as you know, running apt-get and aptitude can cause a database to get > out of sync...
Actually I have only recently become aware of this. I had previously just thought of aptitude as a menu based front end for apt, so I tended to use 'apt-get install' when I knew exactly what I wanted, and 'aptitude' when I needed to browse or couldn't remember the command to do something :-/ > but your plan is not without merit. If you have > previously used aptitude exclusively, you can do the same thing as > above but s/apt-get/aptitude/g. > > aptitude update && aptitude upgrade > > will give you the same behavior as apt-get... Ah, thanks. That is worth knowing. > > to get the easier updates done first, and then if that goes well > > follow up with a hopefully smaller > > apt-get dist-upgrade > > to deal with the remainder in a separate run. > > and then follow up with > > aptitude dist-upgrade Is that last line what is needed to get aptitude back into sync? If not, how is that achieved? > > Then I can try running aptitude and hopefully it will have stopped > > crashing and can tell me what else it thinks is left to be done.... > > I missed the bit about it crashing. what's happening? It only started happening after I had tried an 'apt-get install aptitude' to upgrade to the latest version (and co-incidentally after I had done the 'apt-get install' of the pgp keyring - so I am not certain which was responsible). What happens now is that after any attempt to issue a 'u' command in aptitude, I get an abort leaving me back in the command line (with a garbled display) and the error message: aptitude: symbol lookup error: aptitude: undefined symbol: _ZN9pkgPolicyD2Ev > > One of the things that bothered me about what aptitude wanted to do > > was that it included several packages it threatened to remove because > > they were 'no longer used'. I don't know how it decided this, as the > > list included packages like 'xv' and 'xearth' which I explicitly > > installed and definately use quite regularly.... > > run aptitude in interactive mode and manually mark those packages: > > aptitude > > then 'u' to update, 'U' to mark for upgrade, then 'g' to see what it > want to do. scroll through and mark 'm' on those you want to keep, > which should mark them as manually installed. you may need to '+' > them as well, to keep them around. I have not been using aptitude long > (having used apt-get exclusively before), but am learning that you can > actually get it to do what *you* want with a little fiddling. Then it > will generally respect what you want... So this behaviour could be the result of my having installed some applications using 'apt-get install' rather than aptitude, leaving aptitude unaware of them being manual rather than automatic installs? That would explain things. Thanks for the advice. Regards, DigbyT -- Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com http://www.digbyt.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
