Charles Curley's Weblog

As though I needed yet another reason to not buy a Windows mobile phone, or an Xbox, the folks in Redmond have provided one. Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace has banned apps licensed under the GPLv3, Affero GPLv3, and LGPLv3. And "any equivalents", whatever that means.

Note that not all open source licenses are banned. Case in point, the ever popular GPL version 2 is not explicitly banned. OK, so far so good. But is it banned as an "equivalent"? I am not a lawyer. I am also not a WinPhone user. And I expect both conditions to continue for quite a while, possibly forever.

I've just updated my article, gnome–gps: a simple GTK+ GPS monitor. Changes: Update to 5.0. Added an icon. Changes to match changes in the API. Many bug fixes. We now show the driver information in the title.

No, this is not about finding the library at Alexandria. Sorry. It's about recovering from accidentally deleting some libraries on a Debian based system, in my case Ubuntu 10.10. Which I did a few days ago. Oops.

Running aptitude reinstall <package-name> will re-install a package, restoring deleted files. OK, that's kewl enough. But which ones?

To find that out you need to know which ones are corrupted or missing. To do that, install the package "debsums".

# aptitude show debsums
Package: debsums                         
New: yes
State: not installed
Version: 2.0.48+nmu1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/admin
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Uncompressed Size: 274k
Depends: perl (>= 5.8.0-3), ucf (>= 0.28), debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0
Description: tool for verification of installed package files against MD5 checksums
 debsums can verify the integrity of installed package files against MD5
 checksums installed by the package, or generated from a .deb archive.

#

Simply run that against every package to get a list of packages to reinstall:

for i in $(pre | cut -f1 ) ; do debsums -c $i | grep missing ; done

And reinstall as needed.

You can narrow your search by feeding regular experessions to pre, e.g.:

for i in $(pre '^[n-o]'| cut -f1 | sort) ; do debsums -c $i | grep missing ; done

Unfortunately some packages don't deposit md5sums where debsums can find them. "binutils" and "bogofilter" are two. I suppose you could reinstall those just in case. If you use a local package cache program like "apt-cache", the download process should go quickly for packages already in the cache.

Better than that, install "debsums" now. It adds a configuration item to force generation of md5sums when packages are installed. See the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90debsums.