Nothing is installing in ubuntu
 

Hi,

This problem is making me mad :mad: because it has never happened before.

The Problem:

-I've just installed ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy onto one of my old machines and I don't have wine (I really need it!)

I went to the konsole and type:

"wine --version"

and it said:

"The program 'wine' is currently not installed",

so I type:

"sudo apt_get install wine"

and it tells me:

" dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem."

so manually ru it and it tells me:

"dpkg: requested operation requires superuser privilege"

I am the superuser so, ???? and it does this for all things I try to install



I also try to get it through the Add/Remove option in the menu, but it tells me the same thing as when I type "sudo apt-get install wine"

Why does it do this? It has not done this on any of my other installations. I am dual-booting with winXP 'cause the woman wanted to use both, could that be the problem?

I have looked into Cedega, but I'm not prepared to pay $$$ to install windows applications on linux.

I even downloaded the latest version (9.55) and tried to install, but that failed.


SYSTEM SPECS:

-Mobo - Gateway
-CPU - Pentium 3 866 MHz
-memory - 512 MB SDRAM
-GPU - (integrated) Intel 820, is not supported by Intel any longer
-HDD - WD 200GB, partitioned into 5 slices. (1x 100GB for winXP, 1x 50GB FAT32, 1x 1GB win SWAP, 1x 15GB ext3 for ubuntu 7.10, and 1x 35GB unused.

I'll be thankful for any help you can offer.

well this kinda tells me this is a source deb that has to be compiled with dpkg________
and that is why it has to be done manually dpkg --configure -a. seams you are missing some libraries. and it is not getting past the configure stage. make sure you have your deb build programs and make aoutomake aoutoconf etc so it can build from a deb source file. some debs are pre built but some are deb.source files.make sure you have a g++ compiler type in a teminal cc then enter it should read out.(cc: no input files) that means at least you hav a g++ compiler go into your deb package manager and see all you programs then use your apt get to get the devel programans

if you installed from a live distro you will be missing all the development files so apt-get them.

I'm not so sure if it's a source package that's dealt with here. Or if that's the case, I've been installing _loads_ of source debs that just happen to message that when the installation operation is stopped before it's finished. I know my pc isn't the fastest on earth, but the packages do install pretty swiftly, so I thought they're binaries - source compilation takes so much longer - and still I face that error each time I interrupt apt before it's install process is successfully ended.

Well, what you do after that message:
That should fix it, if it does. Then re-run
if it wasn't installed yet.

Note that on Ubuntu the root account is locked for good reasons (if you're against that, it's ok to me - you're free to do what you want, like burn down your house - but it actually is a sensible thing to do if you consider it), and the first user that is created (during the setup) is given full sudo rights. That means that user is the "main" user, who can run anything with root privileges, using sudo. Yeah, you can even become root trough sudo "abuse", but that's not the point here. Rest of the users created will not have sudo privileges by default, unless you give it to them - and if you do, be careful, or they can become root and kick your butt :) Anyway, the first user created during setup has pretty much power, but not without sudo - it's a minimum line of defense, so to say, and not particulary safe unless you think before doing. It's better than logging in as root, but worse than working with thought.

So anything system-wide or admin-like you do, you do trough sudo. That means put "sudo" in front of the command you would otherwise run as root. It asks your user's password unless you just put it in a moment ago (it forgets it in a moment, for security, but I'd rather not have it remember it at all), and then runs the given command with root privileges. Without that the command is run with your user's privileges, which are lower, and can't for example change files owned by someone else; typically system files are owned by either root or some dedicated user/group that is created for the job.

Shortly:
should fail, because apt-get needs high privileges to change system files, and that command is executed as regular user, who can't change system files.
does not fail, because apt-get is now run with root privileges, and can change system files.
should fail, because the command is executed as a regular user who can't write to /
makes pretty nice damage, because now 'rm' (remove files) is executed as root (because of 'sudo'), and the flags 'r' and 'f' mean 'recursively' and 'force' (or 'without asking questions). Means it tries to remove, without confirmation, each and every file on your filesystems mounted under /, which means all mounted ones :)

Note that apt is nice when it tells you what to run in order to try and fix the situation. It would be more difficult if it just told you "error" and stopped there.

hey b)uncer you are so right I just re-read the original post did you see how they typed sudo apt_get instead of sudo apt-get ,-------- correct cool handle B0uncer lol good luck

Sorry about the typo. But I did type "sudo apt-get package" into the konsole.

Thanks bOuncer, you were right. I had failed to type "sudo" before "dpkg --configure -a," I did so and it worked, and everything is good now. Until now I had not known the significance of using sudo and what it's purpose was.

Forums like this do a world of good for a lot of people, keep-up the good work guys.