On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:24:22 -0500 Harry Putnam <harry.p...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Due to unbridled personal bungling, I've created a nasty mess while > installing sendmail. > I've never been near sendmail, so I can't help directly with the problem. I've seen the other replies, and: 1) If you need a mail server but have no previous experience, have heard of sendmail and are unaware of anything else, then yes, I'll join in the recommendations that you pick a different one. It is notoriously the most difficult to configure. 2) If you have a specific reason to install sendmail, then do it. Answers to IT questions which start "well, if I were you I wouldn't try to fix this, I'd do something completely different" are sometimes unhelpful, though it is often difficult to guess how much someone knows, and they may be unaware that there is a method which is usually considered better and/or easier. To press ahead, try using dpkg direct, which is more difficult and dangerous than apt, precisely because it doesn't usually stop you shooting off a foot. Sometimes that really is what you want to do. I don't use it often, so start with the man page and figure it out. Forcible, unconditional removal of something is not too difficult, as I recall. But sometimes it doesn't work; your error message comes from dpkg, and that *may* mean it will still stop you, or it may just mean that apt wasn't prepared to kick it hard enough. It happened to me once, oddly enough also with a mail server, exim4. I was upgrading a distribution and was not warned to throw away my old configuration file, which prevented full installation of all parts, and configuration of one of them. Aptitude was helpless, and even dpkg, invoked with extreme prejudice and maximum swearing, wouldn't remove it cleanly. I eventually resorted to reading the file list and hunting them down one by one, with manual deletion, and I could then reinstall from scratch. You may have to do that. If necessary, dpkg -i <package>.deb will install a .deb without a lot of apt's caution. Use it carefully, when you are sure dependencies are already in place. Best of luck. Sometimes it comes down to that. -- Joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110928160551.5cad1...@jretrading.com
