From: Gary Coady (gary@netsoc.tcd.ie)
To: ilug@linux.ie
Subject: Re: [ILUG] Debian 3 - 2 Issues
User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.23i
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 14:14:17 +0000

On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 06:33:54PM +0000, Mark Page wrote:

> 1) I'm trying to find my mutt config file but 'whereis muttrc' returns
> nothing. I thought this would be in my home directory or findable as
> root. No luck. Can anybody point me in the right direction?

It's /etc/Muttrc (note capital letter) for some reason on Debian.

> 2) Following install a couple of window managers refuse to install which
> is not causing too many problems except when installing numbers of other
> packages. I've tried apt to remove and dselect to remove to no avail and
> the error messages continue. Error seems to be missing files. I may need
> to provide detail of the messages for a solution but I do recall a
> 'apt-get install' type command that simply removed the hanging packages.
> Any help appreciated

For removing a package, best to use dpkg directly when things are going wrong.

dpkg -r <package>

If there's actually an error in the uninstallation script which stops it from being removed, you may have to edit either of

/var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.prerm
or /var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.postrm

to fix the scripting error which is causing the removal to fail.

Gary.