went and busted my Mint
 

Hi,

I wanted to install electrum 2 so went to there site and followed instructions, first command was:-

https://electrum.org/#download

the console kept giving an error , something about trying sudo apt-get -f install (without a package)

I gave up in the end but on restarting Mint wont load any more (just get a flashing cursor on black screen). I can get the grub and I tried all the repair options in the recovery menu but dpkg is showing that same error and i have no idea what to do anymore :(

I keep trying and trying to replace windows with linux but soooo many problems i spent months trying to get everything to work as i would expect/need and i was almost getting somewhere.

Thx all.

That shouldn't break anything. Have you done a recent "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade"? Maybe your system was working off of an old package listing.

You should really pay more attention to the error messages. We need to know exactly what it said in order to help (you'll also need to know exactly what it said in order to search the web for solutions).

nop that was the only command i used , it showed an error , i searched it to no avail then rebooted.

well i did search the error at the time (before rebooting) but i cant get back into mint to see what the exact error was now , i shall boot the repair and pen&paper the error from there as its very similar. brb

When is the last time you did an apt-get update and upgrade?

Sometimes when you install a piece of software using the central package manager (apt-get in your case) it breaks other functionality by bringing in newer, conflicting versions of libraries. For that reason on Linux you should always make sure your system is up to date before using the package manager to install any new software.

well i just let the built in update app handle all that but i keep it all up to date (AFAIK)

ok the error is something like this, this is after running dpkg in recovery mode:-

but thats just the last line showing missing dependencies, there are a whole load above requiring the same ( libl1-mesa-glx or libgl1)

I can get to a console , i can login , but no GUI , so what should i do next ?

Many thx for your help all.

apt-get was telling you that it wouldn't work unless you first installed one of two packages.

Using -f just tells apt-get to just go ahead because you have a reason for knowing it's wrong about that.

Any lines that start with E: are error messages

so how do i rebuild python from console ?

Why do you need to rebuild python?

From your first post it sounds like your command didn't actually do anything, it just immediately threw an error and stopped. That tells me that the problem already existed and that was simply the first time you saw any symptoms of it. Had you done anything else on the system before that, especially related to libgl?

What happens if you run "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade" from the console? What happens if you try to install one of those packages that it's complaining about?

update & upgrade
Attachment 19265

sudo apt-get install libl1
Attachment 19266


After turning comp on i installed wickr which worked fine then installed electrum from repo but noticed it was the older version so i went looking for ver2, thats all i did.

Sorry i cant get better pic, crap camera.

From your output:

Try the first one.

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx
Attachment 19268

Well something definitely got borked in whatever else you were doing on the system. I highly doubt any of this is related to the python installation command you ran...it has to be from something earlier.

Maybe look back through /var/log/apt/history.log or /var/log/dpkg.log to see if something there jogs your memory.

As for how to fix it...I would start by just installing all of these packages that it's complaining about, though I'm not sure why apt-get's dependency resolution isn't picking them up automatically. I don't use deb based distributions often and don't have much experience with apt-get.

its all just a bit much for me , i did not do anything other than follow simple installation instructions and bam :-/ . I tried putting in the installation disk to see if i could do a re-install but of course i then remember that live boot DVD's dont work on my comp because of UEFI (it was one of the major problems i spent ages on resolving, then the screen tearing problem took ages too then ... ahh well you get the idea) , i may create a usb stick later , we shall see.

Thx for the help , appreciated :)

Is this a brand new machine? It shouldn't be this big of an issue to get things running, unless this machine uses bleeding edge or otherwise abnormal hardware. If so, you may want to try a distro with more up-to-date support, at least until the hardware has been out for a while and the LTS distros catch up.

As for UEFI, you should be able to just disable secure boot in the BIOS, unless Windows is forcing you to keep it around.

well its quite new and the Nvidia card is pretty new too.

well i suppose all this knowledge is ok in retrospect but we all start out somewhere :-/

I ill prob do a new install , at least i know most of the things i have to do to get around most of the problems but its just the way it dies from nothing really. Im desperately trying to get away from windows but at least everything just works (video cards , printers, boot sectors, web cams etc (even the shutdown button stopped working on mint17.1 at one point, i found it was a common problem, jess)).

Anyhow, thank you again for your help.