On 08/09/2017 10:28 PM, Default User wrote:
Thanks, Jape!
That's a lot of information to digest, but I'll give it a try. I wish
there was an automated tool that could go through the system, to find
and report any missing or invalid or circular dependencies, etc., and
fix it or at least say "here's what you need to do to fix it". Maybe
someday.
Well, actually, that's what debsums does. At least the finding part. And
fixing with apt isn't really hard at all. Once you found the missing
bits and the packages they belong to, using apt or apt-get with the
appropriate parameters generally fixes problem pretty easily.
Aptitude's textual user interface (Just execute aptitude in a terminal.)
has the ability to find broken packages where entire dependent packages
are missing, but I don't think it works as well as debsums coupled with
apt or apt-get does when problems are caused by partially installed
packages or missing/corrupted individual member files of a package.
If you haven't used these particular tools because you use something
like Synaptic (which I know almost nothing about) or an autoupdater
(which I know so little about that I don't even know its name), then
getting used to these command line or TUI tools might take a bit of time
and study.
They do allow you to see what changes a command will make to the system
before you actually commit to it, so they're not quite as scary as they
might look at first. The man pages can be pretty useful.
At any rate, running
# debsums -acs
in a terminal, then copying and pasting the terminal outlet into a reply
to this thread may give us enough information to start with. It may
prove that I'm all wet about this, and your problems with background
changing are caused by a bug in whatever got updated.
Give it a shot! The debsums -acs command won't do anything to change
your system, so there's no risk.
And, of course, if you have questions about how these utilities are
working, you can just ask for help. One step at a time. Being unable to
change the background isn't a problem that has to be fixed right of way,
so you can take it slowly.
JP
