[vox-tech] Help with removal of a stubborn debian package

[Peter Jay Salzman]

doug,

you might get away with doing:

   touch /var/run/kdm.pid

or perhaps putting a bogus pid in there.  the script might not check the
return value of the kill command.

this is definitely worthy of a bug report!

pete


begin R. Douglas Barbieri <doug@dooglio.net> 
> Hello all in vox-tech land,
> 
> I tried to install KDE3 using the sources specified on this page:
> http://mypage.bluewin.ch/kde3-debian/
> 
> I had trouble getting kde3 to even log in, so I opted to remove KDE3 and
> try to downgrade back to KDE2.
> 
> For some reason, I can't remove the kdm package. I tried first using
> apt-get remove kdm then I tried apt-get -f install. Finally I tried it
> through dselect. Here is the output I get from dselect:
> 
> ********************
> 
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
>   kdm
> 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0  not upgraded.
> Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 721kB will be freed.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
> (Reading database ... 77713 files and directories currently installed.)
> Removing kdm ...
> Stopping K Desktop Manager: not running (/var/run/kdm.pid not found).
> dpkg: error processing kdm (--remove):
>  subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit status 128
> Errors were encountered while processing:
>  kdm
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
> Some errors occurred while unpacking. I'm going to configure the
> packages that were installed. This may result in duplicate errors
> or errors caused by missing dependencies. This is OK, only the errors
> above this message are important. Please fix them and run [I]nstall again
> Press enter to continue.
> 
> 
> installation script returned error exit status 100.
> Press <enter> to continue.
> 
> ****************
> 
> I can't figure out what is wrong. If I try to run dpkg -r kdm, I get the
> same thing. What can I do to get this stubborn package removed so I can
> reinstall KDE2?
> 
> -- 
> R. Douglas Barbieri
> doug@dooglio.net
> http://www.dooglio.net
> 
> "That government is best which governs the least, because its people
>    discipline themselves."
> 
> -- Thomas Jefferson
> 
> GPG Fingerprint: FE6A 6A57 2B95 7594 E534  BFEE 45F1 9E5E F30A 8A27
> GPG Public key : http://www.dooglio.net/dooglio.gpg
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> vox-tech mailing list
> vox-tech@lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech

-- 
GPG Fingerprint: B9F1 6CF3 47C4 7CD8 D33E  70A9 A3B9 1945 67EA 951D