Linux unbreakable?

Nik · Post by **Nik** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 5:54 pm

I just have to tell you what happend in my qemu Debian testing environment. Yesterday I wanted to update my packages but one of the Servers was pritty slow so I just killed the program and shut the system down. Now I tried to do it again, and first the Update Manager didn't start, then I tried synaptic which told me that dpkg was broken (I remember the last thing it tried to update was itself). Then I thought to myself: "Well if the Update system is broken you are lost" and that probably is the truth for most systems. However Synaptic told me to run "dpkg --configure -a" to reconfigure the update Systenm, i did it and well now it runs again.

btw: These guys work at an exteme speed, I get 82 Updates (takes only 5 minutes to update though) today though my last Update was only a week ago. (That's probably why they call it "testing" but Sarge is simply to old for Desktop use)

Post by **freak** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 5:57 pm

Try updating the glibc package and kill it while it is unpacking/setting up.
Your system will most certainly be toast then

(i know that from experience)

Nik · Post by **Nik** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 6:04 pm

Sounds like a lot of fun^^I think there is a solution though, here is what I would try:
1. Get a good debian based LiveCD with full Tool coverage (Like GRMl which doesn't have so much fancy desktop stuff but everything a developer needs) (One should always have such a CD lying about)
2. Run the LiveCD
3. Mount your Root Filesystem
4. Chroot in it (isn't that easy if you want to be able to run GUI tools or use the Internet (Tutorials are easy to find though))
5. now you can run apt-get in the chrooted Environment
6. Restart

btw: I needed this method when I had to reinstall a misconfigured boot loader on a school system. It workd but we had some unrelated problems afterwards so my teacher decided to set it up from scretch

dracflamloc · Post by **dracflamloc** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 6:20 pm

freak wrote:Try updating the glibc package and kill it while it is unpacking/setting up.
Your system will most certainly be toast then (i know that from experience)

Just go into a minimal failsafe shell found in most distros and you can recover it.