[Solved] is LMDE's old MintUpdate broken?

[ginjabunny]

Hi,

As I couldn't get some updates which fixed hardware issues with the new Update Pack version a while back I decided to stay with the older original MintUpdate in LMDE, but is seems that it is not working properly the last two times when I ran it, the packages are downloaded and it then says it can't continue due to an error and this is displayed in the details

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Preconfiguring packages ...
dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable.
dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable.
dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable.
Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
A package failed to install.  Trying to recover:
dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable.
dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable.
dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable.
Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin.

so I tried "sudo apt-get upgrade" but get the similar errors, but if I "su" first then do "apt-get upgrade" it then works! (so the programs are there)

From my account I tried installing packages via Synaptic and it seems to work fine.

So either MintUpdate has changed or something has changed the path in my account (if so should I try to the path back and what should it be and where do I put it?)

Any ideas?

It also raises another couple of questions - 1) can I still switch to the new Update Pack version or am I now at a point where I am out of sync and it would cause problems? (I am now running kernel v3.0.0.1-amd64), 2) will Mint be supplying newer versions of packages it originally shipped with which Debian do not supply, e.g. Thunderbird on my LMDE is v3.1.7 but v6 was releasd recently, .

Regards,
GB

[zerozero]

sorry for the very short reply, i'm in hurry, later this night i will come back to this, but the fist and most important part is this http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... start=1120 (sudo was broke in the last update)

[ginjabunny]

Thanks zerozero for the info, that would make sense if MintUpdate is using sudo then that would explain why su works, so is there a newer working version of sudo or can I roll it back to an earlier version?

Thinking back I do remember a sudo update being installed about 3 updates ago and it did ask if I wanted to replace sudoers file and I wasn't sure so chose to keep the old version, as I thought it may break it!

Have tried swapping "etc/sudoers.dpkg-dist" with "etc/sudoers" and rebooted, no updates to install at then moment so can't test MintUpdate at the moment.

WIll see what that does!

PS I have noticed in LMDE that some updating packages ask if you want to replace config files, never sure to replace or not!

[zerozero]

hi,
to make sure, check if your PATH is correct, it should look something like this

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Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"

and after you can try it with a

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sudo apt-get update

it shouldn't give you errors

as for the config files, a lot of posts were written here about it, the more or less general consensus is to accept the maintainers file;

in the first post you raise other questions
- update-packs: depends on your sources.list

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inxi -r

tells us what? but theoretically at any given point you can switch to incoming or latest (the only downside i can see is that you'll be "ahead" of repos for awhile;
- depends on the manpower ultimately, FF was updated to v.5 not long ago, TB not yet, but you don't need to wait if you don't want you have iceweasel and icedove

[ginjabunny]

thanks zerozero, swapping the sudoers file to use the new version fixed it as it contained the secure_path which the old one didn't.
In future I will let the installing package use the new config (unless I definitely know I have changed it for some good reason)
I will check out Icedove/weasel, although I start using Chrome and Evolution on LMDE laptop, but I use Firefox & Thunderbird on my main Mint Desktop PC.