I just got a new n800 and have been happily installing applications. Unfortunately, when I tried to install zsh from the maemo applications2007 catalogue, it hung.

I installed xterm and got root. When I looked at where its supposed to be, it looks like all the links are there, but the actual application (/bin/zsh4) did not exist.

Now, when I look at the application manager, zsh is listed, but is in red instead of black/grey. When I try to uninstal it, it says "Unable to uninstall zsh."

I'm familar with rpm, but not with whatver package manager is present in the n800. I can easily manually clear the soft links the installation created, but I don't know how to clear the package database.

Is there some equivalent of "rpm -e --force" or something to clear the package database?

Thanks!

billo

This is also a problem with zsh on the 770 -- except uninstalling gives "Operation Failed" and any further actions in the App Manager also give Operation Failed, and all following installations or uninstallations fail! This is serious! The only way to be able to install or uninstall stuff again, that I've found, is to reflash the OS!

I couldn't try anything as root because becomeroot wouldn't install.

Hopefully the zsh maintainer reads these forums...

[edit] or maybe try the solution suggested in this thread: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ead.php?t=3467

apt-get check/clean and also dpkg-* will quickly become your friends. lucky for you that you already had xterm installed.

Thanks. I guess I'm going to have to learn a little about debian distros. Apt-get gave me a slightly more diagnostic error, though it didn't fix the problem. This was done after doing a check and clean:

Nokia-N800-51:~# apt-get remove zsh
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
zsh
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 6050kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... 13315 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing zsh ...
/var/lib/dpkg/info/zsh.postrm: /var/lib/dpkg/info/zsh.postrm: 10: remove-shell: not found
dpkg: error processing zsh (--remove):
subprocess post-removal script returned error exit status 127
Errors were encountered while processing:
zsh
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)


It's not a horrible problem for me. I can still add other apps. Running ps in the command line revealed there were three hung processes when this thing hung originally. I don't remember what they were, except that two had to do with the application manager and the third was zsh4 itself. I killed them, and freed up the application manager. Since zsh4 itself didn't get saved on reboot, it's not really eating up 6MB of space -- it just has soft links scattered about.

Any of you debian gurus know how to parse these errors?

OK, here's what I did that seems to work. As root:

1) Go to /var/lib/dpkg/info
2) edit zsh.postrm. There are two lines in the script that cause problems:
a) remove-shell /bin/zsh
b) remove-shell /usr/bin/zsh

These are the two soft links to the nonexistent zsh4. I tried putting in the full path to remove-shell (/usr/sbin/remove-shell) but that didn't help. So, I just deleted those two lines.

3) After deleting these two lines, run "apt-get remove zsh" or the equivalent dpkg --purge. It ended just fine for me.

4) Manually delete /bin/zsh and /usr/bin/zsh

That seems to have cleaned everything up

One last thing. I noticed that this leaves zsh.list in /var/lib/dpkg/info, which lists the /etc/zsh files. Also, /etc/zsh and contents were not deleted. So I deleted that directory and the rest of the zsh.* files in /var/lib/dpkg/info by hand.

billo