I’d had a kernel update, but hadn’t enabled Sun’s Virtualbox repos, so VB didn’t automatically update with the kernel. I forgot about it until I tried to use it, and it said it needed to be updated. Dutifully, I followed the instructions and went to the download page, but for some reason, it would give me only the Hardy version, and I’m running Intrepid (upgraded from Hardy). I thought, “Meh, most Hardy stuff works,” and attempted to install it, but it failed partway through the install. I had neither the time nor the inclination to fuss with it then, so I just left it alone.

My old phone was at the IP …102, and that’s where ipod-convenience was looking for it in order to mount it, but the new one is at …103, so I couldn’t mount it. I could still use SSH, and I could still use sftp, but if I just wanted to quickly mount it to grab videos/photos off it, I couldn’t connect because the IP was incorrect. I configured ipod-convenience when I installed it, and couldn’t find anywhere that would allow me to change the IP to reflect that of the new phone. I thought, “Oh, that’s simple. I’ll just uninstall it and purge the config files, then reinstall it with the new IP. No problem–won’t take but a minute or two!”

Problem. The incomplete update to VB had confused dpkg, and I was getting a message, “dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run ‘dpkg –configure -a’ to correct the problem. Second problem. When I tried that, I’d get a message that the group “vboxusers” already existed as a system group, then dpkg would just sort of sit there and do nothing. I had the brilliant idea that if I could install the correct version (for Intrepid) with Gdebi, it might un-confuse dpkg, or at least give me an error that would give me a better idea of how to fix it, but it claimed to be unable to install it. Fuck. I was drinking a little too much last night to feel comfortable invoking the word “sudo” too often (heh), so I just set up ipod-convenience on my laptop and used that for the time being, and thought I’d try to fix it today. After a couple of tries that succeeded in doing nothing but rebooting my system and getting it “stuck” on something called “checking battery state” (it’s a desktop), forcing me to manually reset it (not good for the file system), I finally stopped and thought.

Okay…so it’s telling me to execute a command that I can’t execute because Virtualbox is fuXX0red. What I need to do, then, is remove VB. Not just the application, but all of the config files, too. Excise it like it’s a cancerous tumour. It’s not like I use it often anyway, but once I fix dpkg, I can install VB again if I want to. I know I’ll forget what I did to fix dpkg, so…

To list the broken packages:

dpkg -l | grep -v ^ii

There was one “virtualbox”, one “virtualbox-2.0” and one “virtualbox-2.1”. It was 2.1 that had been interrupted, so I probably could have got away with removing only that, but I said hell on it and nuked all three of them with:

dpkg –purge (name of application).

Once I finished that, I fired up Synaptic, and it all works fine now. I have the Intrepid package for Virtualbox, but the next time I get the brilliant idea that I need a VM environment (which will probably be soon), I’m installing VMWare. Not that I didn’t like VB–it was okay–but it annoyed me and interfered with what I wanted to do with my iPhone, so Sun can fuck off. 🙂