Ubuntu KDE Package Dependency Hell
patrick — Wed, 2010-03-24 15:00
I recently upgraded my mythtv setup to Ubuntu's Koala and had some permissions issues. As all UID/GID settings in /etc/passwd and /etc/group were previously set up correctly so that NFS would work correctly across multiple computers the only thing I can think of is that when the upgrade process removed certain packages in preparation for re-adding the newer packages it also stripped those users and groups out of my /etc/passwd and /etc/group files. As my desktop had the old UIDs and GIDs I compared them to the new UIDs and GIDs on my mythtv backend and my mythtv frontend and all 3 had different UIDs and GIDs.
In attempting to fix the issue on my mythtv frontend I ended up screwing up a couple of things and decided to do a clean install of xubuntu. After it set up the new file system (and before rebooting and adding more packages) I copied the /target/etc/passwd and /target/etc/group to my desktop, injected all the various users and groups I needed across all my boxes (making sure UIDs and GIDs didn't overlap), and added a couple items to /target/etc/shadow.
I then allowed the installation process to eject the live CD and reboot the computer. When it finished booting I logged in and started installing a few items I knew I needed - mythtv-frontend (making sure it wasn't installing the backend, which would be redundant), vlc, k3b, kaffeine, amarok, sun-java6-jdk, php5-cli, php-pear, php-getid3, and mysql-client. In the process of trying to add all of these I noticed that mysql-server-core-5.1 was being automatically installed... Why?
