Hi,

I've used linux for several years but still feel a newbie in many areas, so I hope this post is suitable for this forum.

I recently installed linux Mint14 (+Mate) on my laptop. All seemed well until I needed to install the gmt (general mapping tools) package. I tried this with sudo apt-get install and subsequently with the package manager GUI. In both cases I was told that the installation had failed because of dependency issues involving qmail. (Incidentally I had the same problem when trying to install the mahjong game, but I can live without that.)

Now I do not really know what qmail is, nor why it is involved in this process or the package, but looking into the detailed error report, it said that I needed a fqdn. I do not really know what this is either, nor how it is set, nor why I have not hit this problem before (in Ubuntu 10.04 and earlier distributions), but a websearch suggested to me that maybe there was something missing from my /etc/hosts file. In case that is relevant, the content of /etc/hosts is

QUOTE

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 Dell-Lap2011

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

ENDQUOTE

I would be grateful if anyone could tell me what all this is about and how I solve the problem.

Thanks

FQDN stands for Fully Qualified Domain Name (check here) i.e. your system should be a part of some domain in order to install the package.

To me, it seems that you're using some mail service on your system and just because of that it's prohibiting you from pkg installation.

Once invoke following cmds and return with output:

thanks shivaa

Here is the terminal output for the commands you suggested

QUOTE
rharwood@Dell-Lap2011 ~ $ domainname
(none)
rharwood@Dell-Lap2011 ~ $ ps -Af | grep qmail
rharwood 2372 2249 0 22:15 pts/0 00:00:00 grep --colour=auto qmail
ENDQUOTE

I am using thunderbird mail with virginmedia as my ISP and mail server. Virgin media base their mail service on gmail I think, but I have a virgin account not a gmail account. When I was using ubuntu I had the same ISP but used evolution for my mail.

BobHar

It says that you have not defined any domain, therefore domainname cmd returns nothing.

So, I think you should once stop the mail service and then try to install the package. After installation you can resume/restart the mail services.

You can stop service using service utility (I am not sure about Mint whether service utility is there or not, so better try it):
OR you can stop it as:

Thanks for that. I tried those commands with this result:-

QUOTE
rharwood@Dell-Lap2011 ~ $ service qmail stop
qmail: unrecognized service
rharwood@Dell-Lap2011 ~ $ /etc/init.d/qmail stop
bash: /etc/init.d/qmail: No such file or directory
rharwood@Dell-Lap2011 ~ $
ENDQUOTE

I thought that I should therefore try to re-install qmail, but, as I had tried to install it once before (when my attempt to install the gmt package failed) and hit errors, I thought I should try to ensure that there really were no parts of it left anywhere. So I tried to purge it thus

QUOTE

rharwood@Dell-Lap2011 ~ $ sudo apt-get purge qmail
[sudo] password for rharwood:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED
qmail* qmail-run*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 18 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 1,776 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... 184679 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing qmail-run ...
update-service: warning: /etc/service/qmail-send does not exist.

update-service: warning: /etc/service/qmail-smtpd does not exist.

update-service: warning: /etc/service/qmail-verify does not exist.

Purging configuration files for qmail-run ...
Removing qmail ...
rmdir: failed to remove `/var/lib/qmail': Directory not empty
Purging configuration files for qmail ...
rmdir: failed to remove `/var/lib/qmail': Directory not empty
Processing triggers for man-db ...
ENDQUOTE

I found that /var/lib/qmail contained two directories, bin and aliases, so I cleared those out and removed qmail (only aliases actually contained anything, namely .qmail-default). I then tried to re-install qmail, giving this output


QUOTE
rharwood@Dell-Lap2011 ~ $ sudo apt-get install qmail
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
qmail-run
Suggested packages:
dot-forward qmail-tools
The following NEW packages will be installed
qmail qmail-run
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 18 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/395 kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,776 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Selecting previously unselected package qmail.
(Reading database ... 184318 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking qmail (from .../archives/qmail_1.06-5_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously unselected package qmail-run.
Unpacking qmail-run (from .../qmail-run_2.0.2_all.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up qmail (1.06-5) ...

The hostname -f command returned: $1

Your system needs to have a fully qualified domain name (fqdn) in
order to install the var-qmail packages.

Installation aborted.

dpkg: error processing qmail (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of qmail-run:
qmail-run depends on qmail (>= 1.06-2.1); however:
Package qmail is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing qmail-run (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
qmail
qmail-run
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
rharwood@Dell-Lap2011 ~ $

ENDQUOTE

I am not sure what to try next. I am still confused about where this requirement about qmail comes from. I had never heard of qmail until I tried to install this package. Is it likely that the gmt package that I am trying to install uses or needs qmail, or is it the apt-get software that needs it? It is not anything that I have come across before I attempted to install this package (or more accurately before trying to install the Mahjong game). I have installed the gmt package on several versions of linux previously and not hit this problem. Given what the routines in the gmt package do (plot maps), I cannot understand why mailing has anything to do with it at all.

I am grateful for the time and attention you have already given to this.

You can see, when you tried to install qmail package, you're getting...
So better to not install it again. Purge it thoroughly and then try to install gmt package and check what does it return.

PS: Please use [code][code] around commands output that you're sharing. This option is available under menu when you Reply to Thread.

Thanks Shivaa,

I think the problem is now solved in the sense that gmt appears to be installed, and it was mostly your help which got me there.


I am, however, still completely baffled about what was going on, as my first attempts (following your last post) failed. Eventually I went through the whole process aptitude instead of apt-get. Whether that is what did the trick or not I am unsure.


Following your post, I removed all traces of qmail (so far as I can tell), and then tried to install gmt again, but thought it best to first try to purge gmt to be sure that none of it was still hanging around somewhere. However I hit the same problem with qmail like, so


This surprised me. Why is qmail needed when purging a package? Does it mean that it is not the package that needs qmail and that it is apt-get that needs it?

Anyway, as I said, the problem seems to be fixed. Many thanks.

Happy to hear that pb has solved.

Well, I am also not sure, why it asked for setting up qmail while purging a pkg, but it seems some pkg dependency on each other. The simple thing I could conclude is that whenever you run any mail server/services, you will need a FQDN in order to identify your system and it's domain, which actually you do not have. However, the solution was to remove the qmail pkg thoroughly, and then try to install other packages. Perhaps, root cause of all pb was just qmail.

Anyway, please Mark the thread as solved (option is under Thread Tools on top menu), if you think it has so.

This issue isn't going to be solved until the package maintainer removes the requirement for an FQDN. Qmail doesn't need it, smtp doesn't need it, and it adds no value (you could say you were foo.amazon.com if you wanted to). Other mail packages such as exim don't ask for this, so why does qmail.