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

[Dylan Beaudette]

On May 23, 2005, at 11:14 PM, Dylan Beaudette wrote:

> 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!
>

replying to myself late at night, time to go to bed...

after manually re-installing about 30 packages until no errors were 
returned from apt the system *appears* to be fine... however, just for 
fun i tried to make a PDF from a latex file... it works without errors, 
but there is something terribly wrong with the fonts ... now i am 
beginning to think that a re-install of the entire system might be the 
only way to get a functioning computer back...

is there any way to have a debian system check each and every package, 
to see if it contains bogus files?

thanks in advance,

Dylan