I have a fresh debian installed via netinstall. Installation went well, except it gave me a very general error, something like "Error with application installation.", whatever that meant, (log file with more detail?)...

I needed to get an ssh server up, it wasn't installed, and finally took the time to read up on apt
I am new to using apt-get and stupidly did an apt-get clean...ok so no problem right? I'll just download what I need again..

while trying out apt-get update, first I got several errors saying a directory doesn't exist, 3 or 4, so i just did a few mkdir(s), and that seemed to fix it.

then did apt-get upgrade, and got /var/lib/dpkg/status "no such file". From searching the web, I've found that it's a fairly important, so I don't know why its not here on a fresh install

I have checked my system, and there is no old-status or backups of the ../dpkg/status file anywhere, I have checked, and yes I have been logged in as root the whole time.

I Found
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/debianproblem.htm
Which I am in the process of trying out, but

I'm wondering if there is something which I missed after initial installation, since this is now the 5th file I've run into that hasn't existed, in relation to apt and dpkg.


other details
I am new to Debian (but have experience w/ mainly slackware based)
I have plenty of command line experience (but no gui exp)
Version of Debian is 5.0.3

Any pointers are greatly appreciated

Things can go wrong sometimes.
I just made a new netinstall, Debian 5 Lenny.
No problems.

The file /var/lib/dpkg/status is a text file
listing all installed packages.
( file size = e.g. 1.2 MB , 30,842 lines ).
The file has a certain format, and you can only
get it by a reinstall , AFAIK.
.....

Missing /var/lib/dpkg/status can be rebuilt or perhaps recovered from /var/backups/.

If you didn't delete too much of /var you can just try copying /var/backups/dpkg.status.0 to /var/lib/dpkg/status. If the backup doesn't exist you can try rebuilding it ala Karsten M. Self. See the following:

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/pac...e-rebuild.html

Cheers,

Evo2.

PS. I hosed a great deal of /var including all of /var/lib/dpkg about five years ago. I managed rebuild it, and the machine is still running with with the same install today. It was the following week or so that I installed and started using BackupPC.

I ended up reinstalling debian via netinst. The new installation worked well, and I haven't run into any problems. This time I selected only[*]Standard (instead of 4 or 5 of them), when it asked what software I wanted to install. This time all the appropriate apt-get and dpkg-status files were installed correctly, there is also several other files that were installed that weren't there the first time.