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On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 22:54:35 +0000 Grant Sewell <dcglug@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > In a bid to cut down the Ubuntu system installed on an old laptop, I > have managed to strip it more than I had intended. I wanted to strip > it down to command-line only so I could have a nice, clean system to > add a lightweight GUI onto, instead of adding the lightweight GUI and > then trying to remove all traces of the heavier-weight ones, and I > have indeed now got a system that boots to command-line only... and > that's the problem. I haven't got apt, wget, dpkg, etc. Are you really saying that /usr/bin/dpkg does not exist? If you have removed the dpkg package, there is no way of reconstructing the system without replacing /usr/bin/dpkg from some other source - you cannot extract /usr/bin/dpkg from dpkg_*.deb without /usr/bin/dpkg. > Under such circumstances I would be tempted to just say "blow it, > let's re-install"... however... this machine has a broken DVD drive > (and being a laptop, it isn't easy getting another one to work), it > won't boot from USB (despite being a 2.8GHz P4 (so a relatively > newish machine)) and I don't have a compatible floppy drive to put in > the DVD drive bay. I'm not sure I can be arsed to set up a netboot > server (unless anyone has a foolproof guide with explicitly clear > instructions), so I can only see that fixing it is the way forth. You need to get hold of /usr/bin/dpkg for the same architecture and copy it into place. You will also need /bin/tar With a lot of work, it might be possible to then reinstate the dpkg status data by reinstalling every .deb that you need on the system. This will take a lot of trial and error because you will have to work out which packages to install in which order and which need to be installed alongside each other. You may also get a lot of conflicts where files exist but the status data may be corrupt or just lost. I have done this before now but, I have to warn you, it took me ten times longer than the equivalent reinstallation, it required 20 times as much effort and broke constantly. Even after the job is complete, it took several hours to tie up the loose ends. Oh, and this was on a much smaller system with fewer packages. With a second machine of the same architecture, running debootstrap is probably the quickest way of getting the majority of the .debs that you will need for the old system. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/
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