libc6 upgrade resulting in 'ldconfig' not found on PATH
 

Hi,

I just tried installing another version of libc6 (2.10.2-6) with kpackage. It didn't work so I had a broken package on my system. I then wanted to fix it with synaptic package manager which then told me in order to remove it, I had to pretty much uninstall all of linux. I then tried installing the older version of libc6 (the one I'm supposed to have: 2.7-18lenny2). That gave me the error code

dpkg -i '///home/sam/torrents/libc6_2.7-18lenny2_i386.deb' ;echo RESULT=$?
dpkg: `ldconfig' not found on PATH.
dpkg: 1 expected program(s) not found on PATH.
NB: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin.
RESULT=2

I already checked my path and it was:
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
(I found it with echo $PATH)

Has anybody got any idea what to do? I guess my path is okay so the problem is in ldconfig but how can I get ldconfig in the path and where could it be now?

I have lenny at the moment and am a bit of a newbie (I guess messing around with libc6 is one of the more stupid things to do)

okay I found the problem and the solution. With the reinstallation of the other version ldconfig was removed and then it could not complete the install because of failed dependancies. I found the solution:

1. Get hold of ldconfig & ldconfig.real from the correct version:
Code:

aptitude download libc6

unpack it:
Code:

dpkg-deb -x libc6*.deb libc6-unpacked/

copy them out:
Code:

sudo cp libc6-unpacked/sbin/ldconfig* /sbin/

At this point I did:
Code:

sudo apt-get -f install
sudo dpkg-reconfigure libc6
sudo dpkg-reconfigure libc6-i386
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libc6
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libc6-i386

I changed around the versions a little and had to add a line to sources.list but it solved my problem :)

And in your solution half an hour later you used aptitude.
Well, mixing even 2 install-managers inevitably leads sooner or later (Murphy's Law says sooner) to a big mess. And you mixed 3 of them!
Debian recommends for all install-, update-, upgrade- or uninstall-activities aptitude. And they have a very good reason for that! Aptitude is so sophisticated in handling all dependencies, that it is nearly impossible to mess-up a properly installed and running system.
Oh yes, it is possible to some extent: uninstall one of the metapackages, f.i. KDE, neglect the warnings of aptitude and then press "g"... well you're left with a running barebone-system but as a Linux-newbie you sincerely won't like it:)