[COLUG] Ubuntu synaptic hangs

[Lynn David Newton]

Greetings,

Personal background am is supplied below. I present my
problem up front.

On Saturday I rebuilt my PC and installed Ubuntu 7.10. It's
an AMD 64-bit machine that I built myself from parts three
years ago, into which I put two brand new 400GB internal,
SATA drives after backing up my whole machine to an external
drive.

The installation went pretty much flawlessly.

Previously I was running SuSE 9.2, and was happy with it,
though it was getting old.

One of the first things I did upon booting the new system
was to run the Synaptic Package Manager (SPM) and update all
the packages. Again, there were no problems.

Next I proceeded to install a number of packages that I
depend on: XEmacs, MySQL, Apache, and a few other things, so
started that. I had already walked through this entire
process on a virtual machine, running VMware Fusion on my
Macbook Pro, and experienced no problems at all.

While this was loading, I reached down to the front of my
machine to plug in a card reader for my digital camera
memory, and apparently bumped the power button, because
suddenly, in the middle of running synaptic, the power to
the machine went dead, and seems to have left it in an
insane state. (I could have sworn it died the moment I
touched the contacts of my USB card reader to the bus
connector, but I can't prove that.)

It happens that it was MySQL that it was installing when it
went down.

The machine came back up without problems, and I tried to
continue. It told me that because it detected an interrupted
installation I had to run dpkg --configure -a by hand, so I
did that. (Smart program.) It would not complete. The output
looks like this:

# dpkg --configure -a 2>&1 | tee DPKG_OUT
Setting up libdvdread3 (0.9.7-3ubuntu1) ...

Setting up liba52-0.7.4 (0.7.4-11) ...

Setting up libsidplay1 (1.36.59-4) ...
Setting up mysql-server-5.0 (5.0.45-1ubuntu3.1) ...
 * Stopping MySQL database server mysqld                                 [ OK ]
 * Starting MySQL database server mysqld                                 [fail]
invoke-rc.d: initscript mysql, action "start" failed.

whereupon it just hangs. I was not able to kill it with
SIGINT and I couldn't kill synaptic from the GUI. I had to
open another terminal window and kill both processes.

Thereafter I opened SPM again and attempted to *un*install
everything having to do with MySQL. I thought this worked,
and meanwhile I went on to other tasks. Later I came back
and tried once again to install MySQL, and experienced the
same hang.

Furthermore, whenever I try to install any *other* package,
it sees that aborted process and insists that I clean it up
before continuing.

That's the state of things.

I haven't done a lot of configuring of the machine, and my
data is safe (now on the second drive). My inclination is to
re-install from the CD, but that's such a Windowsy solution,
when Ubuntu is supposed to be state of the art and based on
Debian, which almost never needs reinstalling or rebooting,
that it just seems wrong to do that. But I don't know how to
get out of where I'm at.

Before I do anything drastic I'll see if I can debug what's
going on in that rc.d script, but my gut feeling is that
there is enough of MySQL installed that the system thinks
it's okay, but there's something missing.

Any suggestions before I dive in would be appreciated.

By way of personal introduction: I'm new to Columbus, Ohio,
having moved here in November from Phoenix, Arizona. I work
as a senior analyst and chief of documentation for Interhack
Corporation. (www.interhack.com) I've been a professional
unwavering user of Unix and its offspring since 1983, having
worked for Motorola Computer Group for many years, also
MontaVista for a while (which creates Linux for the embedded
market), though I now base most of both my personal and
business work off my Macbook. I've never been a deep down in
the guts kernel guy or systems or applications developer,
nor am I an IT type who tinkers with systems. Most of my
work has been in software testing, but I certainly know
enough that I can talk the language. (I taught Linux and
Unix at a university for a while.) While in Phoenix I was a
member of PLUG (the Phoenix Linux User's Group), and dropped
my subscription to the email list when I moved out here,
figuring there are plenty of wizards here to consult, too.

Any suggestions anyone can offer regarding my problem, so I
don't have to reinstall, would be much appreciated.

BTW, I'm also somewhat new to the Ubuntu / Debian way of
doing things, but I like it so far.

Thanks.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Columbus, Ohio