Unable to update/upgrade 6.7.1 after HD install

[Gondarc]

First thing after installing 6.7.1 to HD on an Advent QC430 laptop (apart from editing the boot string to UK language and timezone and enabling WiFi) is to run Synaptic to upgrade the default install, before adding/configuring anything else. This is failing when trying something with 'perl': E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'perl'. Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details. (2) Any ideas as to why? BTW, the upgrade list presents the 'knoppix-firewall' package as 'Not Authenticated' ... is there a query with this?

[utu]

Greetings Gondarc, and welcome to the forum.

I am a LiveUSB user of Knoppix 6.7.1, but I've heard others say that one can have
problems doing an update/upgrade to Knoppix. Since Knoppix offerings are relatively frequent,
there are not many reasons to upgrade other than sparingly, say an application or a function here
and there.

Some problems arise out of the author's somewhat unique selection of program elements
across different repositories, and not being necessarily constrained to 'stable'.

Knoppix-firewall is an exception to the above. A new forum user like yourself found
the firewall menu item was not changeable. The author almost immediately posted a
correction in the debian-knoppix repository. This won't change the default, but will
allow you to do so if you want.

With a small LiveUSB install one can get into a lack-of-storage problem rather soon doing
a massive 'upgrade'.

[Gondarc]

Thanks for the greetings ... I am a returning UK Knoppix user, but I could not remember my former login name or password, or even email at the time (it has changed a few times since that registration ... mainly as a response to junk mail). My reason for going elsewhere was Knoppix suddenly adopting 1280x1024 as the default setting for my 1024x768 Fujitsu Siemens monitor, and resolutely ignoring all my attempts to reset this in configuration, with the result that I could not get anything displayed ... the monitor is now 10 years old, still going, undimmed and without a dropped pixel, as a second monitor on my son's temperamental W7 machine.

Meanwhile, my liking for KDE headed for Kubuntu, which unfortunately has recently proved to be ... unhelpful ... in dealing with microphones (and the occasional webcam) on a succession of machines, whilst trying to get VOIP organised for a relative with offspring in Australia. Knoppix was an option explored among several and proved to be the only one with any degree of success (not always, but I'm working on that), and also visibly has a faster WM. It also uses alsamixer 1.0.23, which fixes many of the sound problems I have been having, apart from one. The sound card in this 2007 Advent QC430 is a Conexant CX20549 (Venice), which is already out of production, and even alsamixer 1.0.23 fails to configure it properly ... sound levels are way over the top compared to other cards, resulting in distortion even at the conservative default levels in Knoppix ... turns out to be finally fixed with alsamixer 1.0.24, which I found in a dev package on Kubuntu.

My Knoppix problems stem from trying to configure UK localisation. Iceweasel is not OK, but that is because the available UK package is too old and incompatible with IW V8.0, so I have to use US, although the attendant forced upgrade to V8.0 is OK ... Icedove loads with UK localisation, although not the British English dictionary which has to be loaded separately ... the main problem is Libre Office. Attempting to install the BritEng localisation and Help packages triggers an LO update to 3.4.4 which also wants the main LO package (with DB and filters and stuff). The main LO package will not load because of broken Python packages ... and for some reason Synaptic also wants to remove the GIMP, (bluetooth and a bunch of other stuff) which I need, in order to install LO 3.4.4. So I thought I would try a bulk upgrade first to get the kinks out and then see if the LO localisation works ... but as first reported in this thread, a bulk upgrade barfs on Perl. I tried running apt-get directly, but although that seemed to work, it held back about 40 (out of 24 packges and left Synaptic with a permanent barf on the perl problem for any other install. Trying the LO localisation install via apt-get also hits the Python problem, which relates to two missing dependencies, that apt-get refuses to install.

Any suggestions?

[utu]

My reason for going elsewhere was Knoppix suddenly adopting 1280x1024 as the default setting for my 1024x768 Fujitsu Siemens monitor, and resolutely ignoring all my attempts to reset this in configuration, with the result that I could not get anything displayed ... the monitor is now 10 years old, still going, undimmed and without a dropped pixel, as a second monitor on my son's temperamental W7 machine.
...
Any suggestions?

I would first try lxrandr (the gui);
If that doesn't give you a 1280 choice, then use xrandr in a terminal to see what
your choices are; hint, just xrandr <enter> gives you the name of the display and
all the choices it knows.
Sometimes lxrandr doesn't know all the choices.

And, good luck.

[klaus2008]

... This is failing when trying something with 'perl': E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'perl'. Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details.

If you issue the command

man 5 apt.conf

in a terminal you can read the fine manual page. You should find the following section.

Immediate-Configure

Defaults to on which will cause APT to install essential and
important packages as fast as possible in the install/upgrade
operation. This is done to limit the effect of a failing dpkg(1)
call: If this option is disabled APT does treat an important
package in the same way as an extra package: Between the unpacking
of the important package A and his configuration can then be many
other unpack or configuration calls, e.g. for package B which has
no relation to A, but causes the dpkg call to fail (e.g. because
maintainer script of package B generates an error) which results
in a system state in which package A is unpacked but unconfigured
- each package depending on A is now no longer guaranteed to work
as their dependency on A is not longer satisfied. The immediate
configuration marker is also applied to all dependencies which can
generate a problem if the dependencies e.g. form a circle as a
dependency with the immediate flag is comparable with a
Pre-Dependency. So in theory it is possible that APT encounters a
situation in which it is unable to perform immediate
configuration, errors out and refers to this option so the user
can deactivate the immediate configuration temporarily to be able
to perform an install/upgrade again. Note the use of the word
"theory" here as this problem was only encountered by now in real
world a few times in non-stable distribution versions and was
caused by wrong dependencies of the package in question or by a
system in an already broken state, so you should not blindly
disable this option as the mentioned scenario above is not the
only problem immediate configuration can help to prevent in the
first place. Before a big operation like dist-upgrade is run with
this option disabled it should be tried to explicitly install the
package APT is unable to configure immediately, but please make
sure to report your problem also to your distribution and to the
APT team with the buglink below so they can work on improving or
correcting the upgrade process.

You could open a terminal and create a file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/11Immediate-Configure with the line

APT::Immediate-Configure "false";

using leafpad

sudo leafpad /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/11Immediate-Configure

or any other text editor of your choice. After saving the file and exiting the text editor you could try

sudo apt-get -f install

If this succeeds you can remove the configuration file

sudo rm /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/11Immediate-Configure

I hope this helps.

[Gondarc]

Utu:
Thank you. Someone suggested the xrandr option back at the time (several years ago) but the basic problem was simple ... Knoppix set up to display at 1280x1024, but my monitor would not accept anything above 1024x768 and stayed blank apart from an "Out of Range" message ... I had no other monitor available ... so I simply could not issue any command after the initial boot instruction (where the screen appeared to be at 800x600) because once the boot process started I could not see anything and thus had no idea as to what stage the boot had reached, apart from the nice lady intoning "Initating Start-Up Sequence" on the speakers. I tried alternate boots (including framebuffer) with various cheat code settings, but Knoppix resolutely went to 1280x1024 each time. After a couple of days of this, my comments were bordering on unprintable ... and then I found Kubuntu. Hey, ho. Returning to Knoppix has actually been very useful for forcing me to lose the convenience of GUI installs and get my fingers dirty in the system again ... since I first started on Unix-style systems with SCO Xenix (pobody's nerfect), which time could only be described as "interesting" ... I am finding the fun in Linux again. I may try the old monitor once more (if I can prise it off from my son's system), because I am restoring an old HP business server unit as a temporary workstation for a colleague on a limited budget ... this could get "interesting" again.

Klaus2008:
Thank you, too. Yes I found and read the manual page, but did not know how to disable the Immediate Configure. Relearning as I go. Will try with apt-get over the next few days and report back.

[Gondarc]

Adding the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/11Immediate-Configure had no effect on a "sudo apt-get -f install" command which reported nothing wrong. I left the file in situ and ran "sudo apt-get upgrade" which updated 172 packages, including some but not all of Libre Office, but kept back 86 packages (including the rest of Libre Office):

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  cpp cpp-4.6 ffmpeg gcc gcc-4.6 gcc-4.6-base gdisk gnome-mplayer grub
  icedtea6-plugin libao-common libavcodec53 libavdevice53 libavfilter2
  libavformat53 libavutil51 libcairo-perl libgail-common libgail18 libgcc1
  libgfortran3 libglib-perl libglib2.0-0 libgnome2-canvas-perl libgnome2-perl
  libgnome2-vfs-perl libgomp1 libgpod-common libgpod4 libgstfarsight0.10-0
  libgtk2-perl libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-bin liblocale-gettext-perl libmpc2
  libpango-perl libpostproc52 libpulse0 libpurple0 libquadmath0 libreadline5
  libreadline6 libreoffice-base libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-calc
  libreoffice-core libreoffice-draw libreoffice-filter-binfilter
  libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-gtk libreoffice-impress libreoffice-math
  libreoffice-writer libsnmp15 libstdc++6 libswscale2 libtext-charwidth-perl
  libtext-iconv-perl mplayer network-manager network-manager-gnome
  network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome network-manager-pptp
  network-manager-pptp-gnome network-manager-vpnc network-manager-vpnc-gnome
  openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless perl perl-base perl-modules pidgin
  policykit-1-gnome python python-minimal python-uno samba-common smbclient
  ttf-opensymbol usb-modeswitch usb-modeswitch-data vim vim-common vim-runtime
  vim-tiny
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 86 not upgraded.

Synaptic still wants to remove packages wholesale in order to upgrade the rest, where apt-get just holds them back ... where do I find out why apt-get is holding these back?

Also, if I try to install the Libre Office British English package, Synaptic still wants to remove things wholesale, including compiz-configuration-manager, gimp, kompozer, adriane (various), bluetooth (various), cpp (various), gnome (various) et al; where apt-get just reports:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 python-pyatspi : Depends: python-pyorbit but it is not going to be installed
                  Depends: python-gnome2 but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

which is puzzling, because all three python packages are installed and apparently at the latest version.

Hmmm!

[klaus2008]

If you start Synaptic Package Management you can set the "Package upgrade behavior (default distribution)" on the "Distribution" tab of the "Preferences" window in the "Settings" menu. The default is "Always prefer the highest version". This means you will almost always get packages of the "unstable" ("sid") or "testing" ("wheezy") distribution if you decide to upgrade or install new packages.

On the other hand the program apt-get uses the configuration file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00knoppix with the first line reading

APT::Default-Release "squeeze";

At the moment the distribution "squeeze" is a synonym for "stable", but in the future "stable" could be today's "testing" distribution. Therefore it is better to use the distribution's real name "squeeze" instead of "stable".

Sometimes installing new packages conflicts with the version of existing packages. Then the package management program calculates a solution based on your default distribution and the packages to be installed. Very often you get a "solution" that implies the removal of packages which are important for you. Since the two package management programs use different distributions as default it is obvious that you will get different solutions if you want to upgrade or install new packages.

If you decide to use apt-get you have the possibility to specify precisely that you like to install a package from a certain distribution by issuing

sudo apt-get libreoffice-l10n-en-gb/testing

for example. There is also the possibility to overwrite the default distribution in the command line

sudo apt-get -t testing install libreoffice-l10n-en-gb

Then apt-get prefers packages from the "testing" distribution.

If apt-get tells me that a package cannot be installed because another package "is not going to be installed" then I try to append the missing package to the list of packages I like to install. In your case I would try the command

sudo apt-get install <package you like to install> python-pyorbit python-gnome2

with <package you like to install> substituted by the real name of that package.

You can use the program apt-cache to learn more about your packages. Example:

apt-cache policy libreoffice-l10n-en-gb

Using Synaptic is comfortable, but apt-get gives you better control over the whole installation procedure.

I hope this helps.

[Gondarc]

Please excuse the short delay ... I have been repairing and re-archiving a photo archive ... cheap storage DVD's are starting to show their deficiencies. Thank you ... the "apt-get -t unstable" option did the trick, after I reviewed a few policies, also pulling in upgrades and many of the held back packages.