Debian

After patching I noticed that there were several packages "Kept back", in my case gnumeric. This could be because the base system needs to be upgraded:

# apt-get dist-upgrade

or it's just missing dependancies

# apt-get install gnumeric

and to ignore the hold:

# apt-get --ignore-hold install gnumeric

I was also told I could specify a version different than that in my version

$ cat /etc/debian_version

to determine my version. Say I was using stable and wanted to try unstable:

# apt-get install gnumeric/unstable gnumeric-common/unstable

Now I want to see what got installed, and where:

# dpkg -L gnumeric

MythTV

Determine your version of debian:

$ cat /etc/debian_version
testing/unstable 

If I now reference http://www.debian.org/releases/ it says I'm using etch (testing) and sid (unstable) as of writing this. Now I will scroll down http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ and look for the /etc/apt/sources.list entry for my version of debian. I add the follow to /etc/apt/sources.list as I choose to use etch:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main 

Now we need to add the package maintainers key to our debian keyring:

# apt-get install debian-keyring 
# gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys 1F41B907 | apt-key add -

Now we can begin:

# apt-get install mythtv

Once this is done, we'll want to use an X application as root, so go to a regular user shell/xterm in X

$ su -p
Password:

and enter your root password.

# /usr/bin/mythtv-setup

and configure your machine, note you should add your mysql username and password you configured during the install. If all has went well, you should now have 5 options in the GUI configuration tool.

Cleaning up

If you notice your root / filesystem is full:

# df -h /
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             6.5G  6.5G   0G  100% /

one of the culprits could be /var/cache/apt/archives

# du /var/cache/apt/archives
4801280 ./var/cache/apt/archives

That is indeed a lot of space

# apt-get clean
# apt-get autoclean
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done

# df -h /
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             6.5G  1.7G  4.5G  28% /

As you can see, this cleaned up 4.5G or 72% of our filled space.

C programming

# apt-get install build-essential manpages-dev

Delete corrupt package

While trying to install qemu-kvm on my remote shell account, my shell crashed. It forced me to reboot the VPS remotely. When I logged in, and attempted anything in aptitude or apt-get it gave me a warning:

$ sudo apt-get remove qemu-kvm
E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.

As soon as I ran 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' it would once again attempt to install the package, locking me out of the shell account. The only way I found to resolve the issue:

$ sudo dpkg --force all --remove  qemu-kvm