I took the plunge and upgraded my Ubuntu install from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron and now apt-get doesn’t work. Everything that depends on it or anything like it doesn’t seem to work. dpkg still does. So, if I update and upgrade (or dist-upgrade), it’ll fetch the packages, just as the update-manager does, but it will crap out with a segmentation fault when its time to install the packages. I’ve joined Lymatas thread at the Ubuntu forums. This will be the first time that I’ve ever asked for help, as the solution has always been a search query away. The solution presented (which is the one that helps most people) does not work for me. If anyone has overcome this problem, let me know how you solved it. I’m about to ask a question on LQ for the first time.
I’ve decided that Lymatas has a different problem and have created my own thread – the first ever linux question I’ve posted to a forum (will also request help at LQ – this is getting to be ridiculous). Check out my request right HERE and see if you can help me kill apt and ressurect it from its death! (or something like that).
My solution?
Remove Ubuntu. Get Debian
On a serious note, I’ve used Debian for over 7 years now and apt-get has borked just once when I couldn’t resolve a broken package dependency.
That’s why I still use Debian, despite Ubuntu being more up-to-date. With Debian “testing” I get a reasonably updated system without a big chance of anything big breaking
(of course, Xorg is another story, but the fix is usually just reinstalling the NVIDIA driver).
Oh crap. By reading the title I thought your Apartment was going to crap. But I’m not surprised that it Geek talk. :p
Not that having your apartment go to crap is a good thing.
not surprised that it’s Geek talk
NOT
not surprised that it Geek talk
not surprised that you’re pretending to not know what I’m talking about
Every distribution I’ve used (more than a few hours or days) has borked except one, Slackware. It’s the only one where I did actually screw up a glibc upgrade an was able to recover. It’s just not that simply with Redhat or RPM based distributions.
But I’ve heard a lot of complaints coming from Ubuntu users I know. Several who use it have mentioned it seems the latest updates are breaking left and right. And no, it’s not the users, one of the guys is probably one of the best administrators in Austin, TX.
Ubuntu to me is losing it’s good track record, seems they’re getting sloppy.
The way that I figure it is if I have to install everything one at a time, I’ll do a BLFS install (which I might do anyways – its one I haven’t tried to do).
Slackware also breaks badly when you try to upgrade it sometimes.
In fact, if you just upgrade packages blindly on Slackware, it borks the system worse than any system I’ve used. Slackware isn’t a magic bullet. In fact, it’s the opposite and throws the blame on the user if anything goes wrong, because its scripts are very, very basic and almost useless when you need to get something done quickly.
I’ve used Debian for 7 years and never had a system break yet (except once when running “Unstable”).
For the convenience Debian offers, it’s breakages are very few.
Slackware, on the other hand, asks the user to do everything and then throws the blame on the user if anything goes wrong and actually makes the user proud of having broken the system because it’s supposed to be an “advanced” Linux distribution. A very clever distribution policy.