Debian Screws Apt, What Am I Doing Wrong? Options

[arzgi]

I tried Zdevil's debian-rootfs (eabi) first. Installed fine to my SL-C3100,
but soon after installing a few debs from official mirror, dependency
problems made apt so broken that I could not install anything more.
First time ever I used sid, I've been running stable Debians on my
desktop pc's for years. I thought, it was just unstable sid.

So tried titchy, then oabi kernels, but they all led to the same
result. Errors that apt gives all usually something like "chown:changing
ownership of file n\465\235 [or any arbitary x\nnn\nnn]: No such file
or directory". Funny thing is, when I execute post-install script of
problematic .deb line by line, works then like it should.

Thought microdrive was dying, changed to cf-card. Did not help.
Next thought, Z's "hd-driver-chip" is corrupted, Bought another
used SL-C3100, but I'm still where I started.

I really cant get it, what causes this? Any hint appreciated.

[pelrun]

I suggest checking that your partitioning setup is correct - it's possible to make it so that multiple partitions partially overlap each other or extend past the actual size of the device, which can cause all sorts of intermittent and cumulative problems.

[arzgi]

I suggest checking that your partitioning setup is correct - it's possible to make it so that multiple partitions partially overlap each other or extend past the actual size of the device, which can cause all sorts of intermittent and cumulative problems.

Thanks pelrun! Did that, everything ok there. So I once again started from scratch, made and formatted partitions,
Then flashed http://www.bigbridgezau.sakura.ne.jp/dev/debian kernel 2.6.20 and installed rootfs. At this point,
etch on my Z runs fine. Cron must be started manually. When I upgrade to lenny, all other debs got installed
fine, cron is stopped and restared during update a few times, no problem there. But dpkg can not install lenny's
cron. Seems that post install script's chgrp is the problem. Or chgrp does not work, because cron is not working.
And that makes system quite unusable.

Blah, tricky one. Perhaps next time I'll bang my head to wall with eabi kernel and oabi system.

[Wildherb]

I suggest checking that your partitioning setup is correct - it's possible to make it so that multiple partitions partially overlap each other or extend past the actual size of the device, which can cause all sorts of intermittent and cumulative problems.

Thanks pelrun! Did that, everything ok there. So I once again started from scratch, made and formatted partitions,
Then flashed http://www.bigbridgezau.sakura.ne.jp/dev/debian kernel 2.6.20 and installed rootfs. At this point,
etch on my Z runs fine. Cron must be started manually. When I upgrade to lenny, all other debs got installed
fine, cron is stopped and restared during update a few times, no problem there. But dpkg can not install lenny's
cron. Seems that post install script's chgrp is the problem. Or chgrp does not work, because cron is not working.
And that makes system quite unusable.

Blah, tricky one. Perhaps next time I'll bang my head to wall with eabi kernel and oabi system.

Since I bought an N810 I've not dabbled much with my Zauruses, however there are still occasions where they ust can't be beaten so I'm planning on keepng them!!!.

I recently had exactly this experience when converting my C3100 back from a very good OZ build to Zdevil's Debian. At first, apt-get and aptitude were just broken and several builds just died. However, after a bit of googling and tinkering I did get a working system. Sadly, I did not record a step-by-step guide to getting out of jail, but here are a few pointers which might help you. I believe that this is not a problem unique to Zauruses, so use google - it is your friend.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=515830

1. set yout sources.list file to this - it is an older version which seems to help you get a foothold:
deb http://debian.logiclinux.com/debian lenny main contrib non-free

2. Always use aptitude rather than apt-get. It seems more reliable. Start with aptitude update then aptitude install aptitude. If this works then you stand a fighting chance.

3. I then installed the apps I wanted, watching the various packages getting updates as I went. If the package does not exist then add this to your sources.list and run another aptitude update
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian lenny main contrib non-free

OK. So most things now work fine, but it is not 100%. Things like python are just too old. I might try an aptitude safe-upgrade otherwise it is a rebuild using yongun's rootfs for me now. I'll let you know how I get on.