[Linux-disciples] apt-get problems

[Dylan Thurston]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 06:11:40PM -0400, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 06:01:37PM -0400, Nirmal Trivedi wrote:
> > I ran fsck which did fix all kinds of broken inodes (?), but it looks
> > like that process also removed /usr/sbin/install-info. The file no
> > longer exists, which also means I cannot run dpkg or apt-get install.
> 
> That sucks. Does anyone know of a way to bootstrap onesself
> into dpkg, short of just sending along a tarball of all the
> dpkg files with all the metadata inside?

A .deb is an ar file which in turn contains some .tar.gz files.  To open
it up:

-------
dpt at lotus:/tmp/dpkg$ ar xvf /var/cache/apt/archives/dpkg_1.10.20_i386.deb 
x - debian-binary
x - control.tar.gz
x - data.tar.gz
dpt at lotus:/tmp/dpkg$ tar xvfz data.tar.gz 
./
./usr/
./usr/share/
./usr/share/doc/
./usr/share/doc/dpkg/
./usr/share/doc/dpkg/THANKS.gz
./usr/share/doc/dpkg/TODO.gz
./usr/share/doc/dpkg/changelog.gz
./usr/share/doc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg
......
------

So you should grab a copy of your version of dpkg (say, from
packages.debian.org), open it up, grab /usr/sbin/install-info, and then
reinstall dpkg the proper way (dpkg -i <dpkg deb>).

You might also want to install debsums to check if you had any other
disk corruption.

Peace,
	Dylan
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