Hi all

I have previously used aptitude on my Debian machine with no problems.

But lately I get this:

$ su
Password:
# aptitude
Ouch! Got SIGABRT, dying..
Aborted



It looks bad (SIGABRT looks to novice me like it just aborted, which sounds severe).

Any ideas where to look for solutions? (I have managed to survive using kpackage while this problem has persisted.)

P.

And what version of Debian are you running ?
Etch, Lenny, Sid, Stable, testing, unstable ? cat /etc/apt/sources.list

What version if aptitude is installed on your machine ? apt-cache policy aptitude

Thanks for the reply:

> And what version of Debian are you running ?
> Etch, Lenny, Sid, Stable, testing, unstable ?
> cat /etc/apt/sources.list

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
# Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
# Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
#deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib

deb ftp://ftp.sci.usq.edu.au/debian etch main

# Suggested for Debian R upgrades by:
deb http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/CRAN/bin/linux/debian stable/


> What version if aptitude is installed on your machine ?
> apt-cache policy aptitude

$ apt-cache policy aptitude
aptitude:
Installed: 0.4.4-4
Candidate: 0.4.4-4
Version table:
*** 0.4.4-4 0
500 ftp://ftp.sci.usq.edu.au etch/main Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status


I trust this is helpful.

P.

have you tried running aptitude with commands ? rather than just aptitude by itself to get into the curses interface ?

aptitude update
aptitude upgrade

There is a reported bug for this version and this problem..
..
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-b...msg337165.html

Thanks for your suggestion. I tried your commands:
aptitude update
aptitude upgrade

Now, many things don't work at all, such as kpackage, kontact. I use these apps all the time (I read mail and keep my calender in kontact, for example), so I'm in a bit of a pickle right now. And since neither aptitude nor kpackage (nor synaptic) actually work now, I'm not sure what to do!

That little knowledge snippet was obviously dangerous for me.

Oh well... back to my Windows machine to work till I get it fixed.

P.

Managed to get kontact and kpackage back. But aptitude still fails.

Your running etch.. an aptitude update / upgrade should do nothing harmful to your system. unless you've been using apt-get instead, which means you need to do an aptitude keep-all prior to the upgrade command to make sure it doesn't uninstall a bunch of stuff..


Did you read the bug report I posted the link for ?

Did you download and install the version of aptitude they recommend you try ?

> Your running etch.. an aptitude update / upgrade should do
> nothing harmful to your system. unless you've been using apt-get
> instead, which means you need to do an aptitude keep-all prior
> to the upgrade command to make sure it doesn't uninstall a bunch
> of stuff..

Oh; OK. better remember that.

> Did you read the bug report I posted the link for ?

Indeed.

> Did you download and install the version of aptitude they
> recommend you try ?

Yes. It was a downgrade from the version I had, and the error persists.

I think I will make do with kpackage. Thanks.

P.

Looks like they claim the bug is fixed.. if you follow the bug report thread to the end..

> aptitude (0.4.4-5~1) experimental; urgency=low
> .
> * Eliminate the crashes due to inconsistencies in the dependency
> resolver. (Closes: #420358, #420381, #420407)

I had this issue on a little VPS I was running. It was only allocated 64MB of memory so it would hit its limit and the crap out. Once I stopped some of the major services (Bind) I was able to install with apt-get.