[vox-tech] ..'xxx is not an ELF file' errors

[Dylan Beaudette]

The other night I was playing around with my linux/PPC powerbook, and 
`aptitude upgrade' failed giving errors on a gtk package. after that 
incident and some repeated attempts of the usual `aptitude -f upgrade' 
and `dpkg --configure -a' aptitude decided that it was going to remove 
a bunch of files: namely everything related to gtk and kde !!

Thinking that I would sit down and fix the problem tonight, i started 
reading up on APT on the debian pages. I was able to force a re-install 
of the offending packages with dpkg, and subsequent `aptitude -f 
upgrades' would mostly work.

However, throughout all of this i would occasionally see the message:
/usr/lib/xxxlib is not an ELF file ...

and some package would fail to be upgraded.

Also, in the process of all of this KDE crashed and seemed to have 
corrupted anything that had previously been downloaded in 
/var/cache/apt/archives/ ...

i figured this must have been due to broken libs or libs of varying 
vintage in use by KDE, and thus the crashes... ? maybe.

right now it is downloading the remaining 55 packages to upgrade (down 
from 277 earlier this evening).

I started wondering if hard disk corruption may have been the root of 
all of this... but the drive is rather new, and was not cheap. i did 
have some hard disk problems in the past with older kernels (i am 
running debian's 2.4.27), perhaps the kernel is to blame...?

any ideas on what might be going on here, or where to go from now?

thanks in advance!

--
Dylan Beaudette
Soils and Biogeochemistry Graduate Group
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341