Hi,

Background: I have successfully done a "Debian-like" installation to hard drive of Kanotix. Things were going fine for a while as I was customizing the quasi-Debian system on the hard drive in preparation to make it back into a liveCD. But I overzealously removed something important via Synaptic and am hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Now, when installing / upgrading a few programs, I get warning messages. For example:

apt-get install mozilla-firefox
[snip]
Preparing to replace mozilla-firefox 1.0.4-2 (using .../mozilla-firefox_1.0.6-2_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement mozilla-firefox ...
Setting up libxinerama1 (6.8.2.dfsg.1-5) ...
ldconfig: /usr/lib/libgnet-2.0.so.0 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

ldconfig: /usr/lib/libnetsnmpagent.so.5.1.2 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

ldconfig: /usr/lib/libdb-4.1.so is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

ldconfig: /usr/lib/libgnet-2.0.so.0.6.1 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

ldconfig: /usr/lib/libnetsnmpagent.so.5 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

ldconfig: /usr/lib/ is not a symbolic link


Setting up mozilla-firefox (1.0.6-2) ...
Updating mozilla-firefox chrome registry.../sbin/ldconfig: /usr/lib/libgnet-2.0.so.0 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

/sbin/ldconfig: /usr/lib/libnetsnmpagent.so.5.1.2 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

/sbin/ldconfig: /usr/lib/libdb-4.1.so is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

/sbin/ldconfig: /usr/lib/libgnet-2.0.so.0.6.1 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

/sbin/ldconfig: /usr/lib/libnetsnmpagent.so.5 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

/sbin/ldconfig: /usr/lib/ is not a symbolic link

done.
Please restart any running Firefoxes, or you will experience problems.



Firefox 1.0.6-2 seems to be working fine, but this sometimes happens with other programs too and I am not sure how big a problem this might be. I tried apt-get upgrade -u, and that didn't solve the problem (sometimes producing the "wrong magic bytes" warnings). I probably need to remove and reinstall something, but I wouldn't want to guess wrong and get myself in hotter water. I have Xandros on another partition, so it might be possible to copy working versions of the necessary files into the other tree and then upgrade again. But, surely someone has a more informed opinion than I do.

Thanks,
Ben

How did you remove the packages through synaptic?

It seems that you have quite a lot of libraries missing. apt-get should automatically install the libraries for you, unless you have somehow deleted them manually or totaly messed up the apt-get system ...

Look at /var/log/dpkg.log, and see if you can find what packages you deleted that cased this.

Hi,

In synaptic, I just mark the packages I don't think I need for complete removal. Obviously, I removed something that I erroneously thought I didn't need, but I didn't manually delete anything outside of the apt / synaptic framework. It is certainly possible that I have totally messed up the apt-get system, although it does still install and remove stuff (occasionally with warning messages about "wrong magic bytes"). The /var/log/dpkg.log file is over 5000 lines long (I have also added and upgraded a bunch of things), so for me, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. But, if someone has an idea of what to look for in that file, I could do that.

Thanks,
Ben

I think my earlier problems came about because I updated to a new version of something that should have been held back. Anyway, I fixed most of the "wrong magic byte" messages by reinstalling the libraries that were producing the messages. Since apt thought the current version was already installed and removing these libraries would have caused a lot of other things to be removed, I did

wget [deb file from debian.org]
dpkg -i [deb file]

There were some dependency issues and later unmet dependency issues, but I eventually got around all of them.

Now, I just am getting just one message that I can't figure out. When I remove or install some packages via apt-get, it says at the conclusion:

ldconfig: /usr/lib/ is not a symbolic link

but still appears to remove or install the package correctly. Perhaps this is related: when I enter /sbin/ldconfig -v, it says

/sbin/ldconfig: Path `/lib' given more than once
/sbin/ldconfig: Path `/usr/lib' given more than once
[lots of output, no error messages]

Can anyone help me with these last few hurdles?

Thanks,
Ben