Re: [Sheflug] Debian dselect...

[Matthew Palmer <nospam [at] ieee.uow.edu.au>]

On Sun, 13 May 2001, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:

> > On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 12:39:04AM +0100, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> > > uninstall particular packages, I run dselect... 
> > 
> > Ah, yes. There's the mistake, right there :)

Agreed.  dselect sucks.  apt-get on the command line rocks.

> Well... I can't interpret it otherwise... Here's a sample line:
>   n* Std admin    ncurses-term <none>      5.0-6      Additional terminal type
> and in status line (when this line is hilighted:
> ncurses-term not installed ;  install (was: new package).  Standard

Aha.  This looks as though it wants to install it but you haven't selected
the [I]nstall option from the main menu.  Try that, see what happens.

> However, doing
> dpkg -l ncurses-term
> produces:
> Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
> | Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
> |/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems
> (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
> ||/ Name           Version        Description
> +++-==============-==============-============================================
> un  ncurses-term   <none>         (no description available)
> 
> So, what does it really mean?
> 
> Well, I think, I was right - dselect really selected automatically a
> number of packages it thought I needed:-) So, I think, I'll let it install
> them all and then start cleaning up:-) (hm, why didn't I do it the other
> way round?...)

The Debian "base package" (the 15MB tarball it sucked across before it
rebooted) contains a complete filesystem that contains a good 15 or 20
packages - enough to get you started (through the initial reboot and into
<shudder> dselect).  Those are probably what you're seeing.  From there, you
should probably configure your package sources (edit /etc/apt/sources.list
if you're feeling adventurous - let me know where you're getting your
packages from (CD, FTP, HTTP, NFS, whater) and I'll hack up some appropriate
lines for you) and then run apt-get update.  When that finishes
successfully, then you can start installing more packages.


-- 
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Matthew Palmer
mjp16@ieee.uow.edu.au

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