unable to repair broken packages

[oye]

Hi,
With the help of great tips on this forum I was able to successfully boot Knoppix on my diskless laptop and do a "poor man" install on external USB hard disk. I boot from the Knoppix cd and then do pivot_root to fire up the debian on the usb disk. All worked fine for few months and then a few days back one of the package upgrade has created havoc - I am not sure what happenned but here is the problem :
- when i try to install any package or do apt-get dist-upgrade ( and any dpkg -i installyion ) I get the following error :

dpkg: serious warning: files list file for package `kppp' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
dpkg: error processing <package> : files list file for package `kpf' is missing final newline.
Processing was halted becasue there were too many errors

becasue of these errors I am unable to install, remove or upgrade any package - except apt-get update nothing works. I have browsed through several forums and used all techinques to reinstall kppp / kpf, delete them, force ignore them etc but nothing has worked. Before I am forced to reinstall debian afresh on my disk from scratch, I want to make this last attempt to find if any of you have faced this probelm and how could I possibly fix this ?

[CrashedAgain]

You cannot update packages using apt-get on a poormans install because updating packages requires rewriting the main iso which is read only on a poormans install. You should be able to install extra packages using klik & update these, however.

[oye]

After I install on the external disk and pivot_root to it - I am using the standard debian install ( rather than knoppix) so apt-get works as it should on any standard debian system.
It was working for me well as I was able to install several packages and keep them updated for a few months before something broke as described.

[CrashedAgain]

After I install on the external disk and pivot_root to it - I am using the standard debian install ( rather than knoppix) so apt-get works as it should on any standard debian system.
It was working for me well as I was able to install several packages and keep them updated for a few months before something broke as described.

Ahh. Then this is not a 'poorman' install. A poorman install is a copy of the knoppix iso image placed on the hard drive. It runs just as if it were on the CD (ie read only) but is faster & leaves then CD drive free for other uses.

However, since you are able to use apt with your installation, it should be fixable. It sounds like your package file has become corrupted, there are two of these. 'apt-get update' will update only the one apt uses, 'dselect update' will update both so use dselect update instead of apt-get update. Try this, then do 'apt-get check' & post the output. I assume you have checked 'man dpkg' for options; for instance you can do -f remove as well as -f install.

Even though Knoppix "becomes Debian" once installed to hard drive, it is not really "Debian" ie it is not the same as a a Debian Sarge installation. There are enough differences so that upgrading especially using apt-get dist-upgrade or apt-get upgrade often causes problems. Knoppix uses a different startup procedure, has built in hardware detection & setup, has custom user setup and has some special packages such as the openoffice-en-de which has no help files. Knoppix also used to use a specific version of gcc which occasionally made compiling packages from source difficult although I don't know if it still does. It is generally recommended to upgrade individual packages only, not do a general apt-get upgrade. And NEVER choose to 'accept the package maintainers version' of a config file in preference to the installed one when asked.