The Debian package system rocks. It really does.

Except when it breaks.

I used to always run a Debian unstable system because I figured that the occasional stability problems were a price worth paying for having up-to-date software.

But then suddenly, everything went wrong. And it was all the fault of KDE4.

I'd always been a KDE user. I much preferred all the options that KDE gave me above the false simplicity of GNOME. As KDE moved to version 4, so did Debian Unstable. I found KDE4 barely workable. After much agonising, I switched to gdm, openbox and fbpanel for my desktop. However, there were still some KDE applications I wanted to use like Amarok and Dolphin which I think is a great file manager.

To get usable versions of this software, I needed to use versions from Debian's 'testing' repository, so for the first time I was running a mixed Debian testing/unstable system.

It wasn't long before things started to break. It all really went wrong, when 'apt-get' wouldn't install anything at all and 'aptitude' would not install a range of KDE updates. The problem was that many KDE install scripts would try to run the update-mime-database script and it would exit with an error.

I poked around the system for awhile. I found out that many of the KDE packages were calling 'update-mime-database', which threw a non-recoverable error when it encountered '/usr/share/mime/packages/network.xml'.

Doing:

mv /usr/bin/update-mime-database /usr/bin/update-mime-database.bak

Fixed this.

Once this was done I could update the script:

sudo aptitude install shared-mime-info

And then update various KDE packages:

sudo aptitude install kmail

Seems to work so far.

Red Hat Certified Technician & Engineer (RHCT and RHCE) Training Guide and Administrator's Reference

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