<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:garamond,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Thanks to all who offered their suggestions. In answer<br>to the question "why not just do a new install?", I had<br>hoped I could learn something by fixing it, and save<br>time in the long run. But in the end, everything I fixed<br>just threw up two more things to fix. So I went the<br>whole hog and (after saving my homedir) installed<br>the new Ubuntu 9.04. Just a few more things left<br>to tweak ...<br><br>Thanks again - Ed <br></div><div style="font-family: garamond,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><font size="2" face="Tahoma"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> "sklist@kitterman.com" <sklist@kitterman.com><br><b><span style="font-weight:
bold;">To:</span></b> calug@unknownlamer.org<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Saturday, April 25, 2009 10:25:46 PM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [CALUG] Repairing Ubuntu 8.04 installation, or installing packages to an alternate destination?<br></font><br>
On Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:05:15 -0700 (PDT) Ed Browne <br><<a ymailto="mailto:edward_d_browne@yahoo.com" href="mailto:edward_d_browne@yahoo.com">edward_d_browne@yahoo.com</a>> wrote:<br>> Hi,<br>> I inadvertently, tragically, uninstalled a bunch of packages on<br>>my Ubuntu 8.04, including some things necessary for both<br>>synaptic and a network connection.<br>> So, short of doing a brand-new install, is there a way to<br>>salvage this system? I'm booted up now on the Ubuntu 8.04<br>>install DVD, so can I either<br>>a) install the packages I need from the DVD to my hard drive,<br>>perhaps targeting a different relative path where I would have<br>>mounted my hard drive, like say "/mnt/usr" and so forth.<br>>or<br>>b) manually install the bare minimum of tools manually<br>>on hard drive, and put the rest packages I need on the hard<br>>drive, then boot up in the hard drive and
install those<br>>pre-positioned packages with some form of simple<br>>command-line package management?<br>><br>Mount the system's hard drive (I use Kubuntu, not Ubuntu, so I can't advise <br>you on which GUI tool to do this with), make a new directory and copy the <br>.deb files for the packages you need (including their dependencies you may <br>have removed) from the dvd into this directory on your system's hard drive <br>(anywhere is fine, but in your user home dir somewhere is safest), reboot <br>into your system, open a shell and cd into the dir with the .deb's, then <br>install the packages using:<br><br>sudo dpkg -i *.deb<br><br>if there are dependency errors, make note of them and try to fix it with:<br><br>sudo apt-get -f install<br><br>Pay close attention to what apt wants to do. If it doesn't want to remove <br>packages, then go ahead, if it does, you didn't get all the packages you <br>need. You'll need to reboot into
the dvd and repeat to get the missing <br>packages.<br><br>That should allow you to reinstall the missing bits.<br><br>Scott K<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>CALUG mailing list<br><a ymailto="mailto:CALUG@unknownlamer.org" href="mailto:CALUG@unknownlamer.org">CALUG@unknownlamer.org</a><br><span><a target="_blank" href="http://lists.unknownlamer.org/listinfo/calug">http://lists.unknownlamer.org/listinfo/calug</a></span><br></div></div></div><br>
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