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mltucker
February 17th, 2009, 10:17 PM
Hello,

I did some searching and couldn't find any solutions to this problem. I backed up my home directory and am ready with a new install disk, so any way to prevent this would be much appreciated. Many details:

I have 8.10 kubuntu installed. I was updating my kernel headers and some libxine libraries when my computer crashed. This means I couldn't switch workspaces, and had basically a white screen and the mouse couldn't move. I "ctrl-alt-f1,f2,f3,etc"ed my way into a command line, but none would work. I had some cryptic error messages that I didn't think to write down, and couldn't get a prompt.

A hard reboot gets me to the command line login with the error message

xmodmap: unable to open display ''

A first startx loaded kde, but I could not move the mouse and I got a series of error messages telling me how badly libxine1 is messed up.. I also did not write these down, and starting x after this gives me the error message:

(EE) config/hal: couldn't intialise context: (null) ((null))

waiting for X server to shut down.

It seemed like a good idea to try to uninstall libxine1, so I did


sudo apt-get remove libxine1

which tells me

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

then,


sudo dpkg --configure -a

tells me

dpkg: parse error, in file `/var/lib/dpkg/updates/0000' near line 1: field name `ag' must be followed by colon.

However, nanoing into this file shows me

ag^_^@bg^_^@...

and I'm not sure what I should do with this. Should I delete the file and hope it will generate a new one? Putting a colon after ag yields

dpkg: parse error, in file `/var/lib/dpkg/updates/0000' near line 2: MSDOS EOF (^Z) in field name `'

This file seems to just be trash. So... I don't even really know what the problem is. I know that it crashed during update, and I can't start x or run dpkg.

Any help would be appreciated!

-Mark

Partyboi2
February 17th, 2009, 11:50 PM
Try

sudo dpkg --clear-avail
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

mltucker
February 18th, 2009, 02:27 AM
Ah. Thanks for the help. Unfortunately I ended up reinstalling. I wish I had waited.

-Mark