On Sat, 12 May 2007 12:05:20 -0700 Daniel Burrows wrote: > On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 06:18:38PM +0200, Francesco Poli > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was heard to say: > > On Fri, 11 May 2007 18:12:03 -0700 Daniel Burrows wrote: > > > > > On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 07:30:32PM +0200, Francesco Poli > > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was heard to say: > > > > $ aptitude search xserver-xorg > > > > > > What happens if you run this command as root? > > > > Mmmmh, strange: it seems to show the 'A' characters when run as > > root, but it fails to show them when run as regular user. It's > > strange, because the sarge version of aptitude used to show the 'A' > > characters no matter which user was running it (I've just > > rechecked...). > > It's especially strange since it doesn't do that anywhere else. > > If you run aptitude with no arguments, do you get any error > messages?
Yes: a red message that states "W: Can't open Aptitude extended state file". > I can reproduce your behavior if I remove read permissions for myself > on /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates, but then I get an error on startup > (non-fatal errors are suppressed in "search"). Bingo! $ ls -l /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates -rw-rw---- 1 root root 1728097 2007-05-08 19:17 /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates Now the question arises: why was this file created with those permissions? I didn't modify them by hand. $ dpkg -S /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates dpkg: /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates not found. Hence I would say this file is not installed by any package. I guess it's created by the first run of aptitude, right? If this is the case, then it could be helpful to know which was the first version of aptitude that was run on my box, couldn't it? It was the one shipped with a network installation CD[1], with the following label: Debian GNU/Linux testing "Etch" - Official Snapshot amd64 NETINST Binary-1 20070303-09:19 As a consequence, after reviewing the QA overview of aptitude[2], I think it was version 0.4.4-1. Does it help? [1] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso [2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/a/aptitude.html -- http://frx.netsons.org/doc/nanodocs/testing_workstation_install.html Need to read a Debian testing installation walk-through? ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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