Sunday 30 October 2011

New to Linux: apt-get question

New to Linux: apt-get question

Hi everyone, I am fairly new to Linux, and am having some problems with a Debian Lenny installation on my NAS device. I have the iomega home network media device. I have enabled telnet on the device, and am slowly finding my way around it. In their wisdom, iomega removed the dpkg configuration files in /var/lib/dpkg. I have created blank duplicates of the various files in order to get apt-get to work. I have successfully installed a couple of packages, such as dropbear, and dpkg in now populating the status file with the various new packages installed.

My problem comes when attempting to install something a bit larger such as cups or mysql on the box. These two packages obviously have alot of dependencies on things like perl, python (in the case of cups), etc.

As far as dpkg is concerned, these packages are not installed on the system, even though perl definitely is as it is used for the web frontend of the nas configuration screen. When I try to install them then, the nas tries to install loads of packages which are definitely already installed.

The crux of my question then, is whether, if I run the command 'apt-get install perl', will this break the pre-existing perl installation, or php etc etc??

Sorry if this is a really stupid question, but like I say I am new to linux and Ive heard lots of horror stories about people bricking these iomega nas devices by trying to install a completely custom linux image so I want to work with what Ive got, but just add a few extra bits of functionality.

Thanks.

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