Thanks again for the information, and taking the time to hand-copy it. (Yes, it would be hard to guess which of the many icons was for the text editor when the icons and their text captions were corrupt. )
I am glad to hear that the icons have been restored.
The information you supplied shows that the file /etc/DISTRO_SPECS contains this line:
Code: Select all
DISTRO_ARCHDIR=''
Code: Select all
DISTRO_ARCHDIR='i386-linux-gnu'
The Puppy Package Manager (PPM) in Precise 5.4.2 has code that moves the newly installed library files to their correct Puppy location and restores the symlinks. But that code depends upon DISTRO_ARCHDIR being set with the proper value, which -- for reasons I don't know -- it is not.In another thread, I wrote:Debian and distros descended from Debian, such as Ubuntu, support "multiarch", which allows a library to have, for instance, both an Intel 32-bit build and an AMD (or Intel) 64-bit build installed on the same PC. (That is one example -- many other architectures are supported.) To do this, Debian and friends will sometimes put libraries built for the 32-bit Intel architecture ("i386") in /lib/i386-linux-gnu/ or /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ instead of the usual /lib/ or /usr/lib/, respectively.
Other distros may handle this differently.
Currently, Puppy continues to use the standard /lib/ and /usr/lib/ directories. For compatibility with Ubuntu packages, Precise Puppy has symlinks from /lib/i386-linux-gnu and /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu to /lib/ and /usr/lib/, respectively.
The problem you have run into is that sometimes when installing a .deb package from a Debian or Ubuntu repository, those symlinks get overwritten, so some needed libraries are not where they are expected to be.
(Some of the commands I gave in my previous post were copied from that code, so when you executed them you were doing manually what would have been done automatically if DISTRO_ARCHDIR had been set properly.)
(I hope I'm not boring you with needless details. I'm being even more long-winded than usual here since you said that your were "really keen to learn a little about Puppy", but perhaps you were thinking of things other than all this nuts & bolts stuff. )
I am glad that you are so willing and able to experiment.Repip wrote:It really is a simple quick exercise to completely reload Puppy anyway so I am willing to try anything at this point.
If you are happy to have your icons back again, and ready to move on to other things, feel free to do so. But if you would like to try something else related to this problem, consider trying this:
1. Assuming that you are now able to find a text editor, use it to open /etc/DISTRO_SPECS.
2. Look for the line that begins with "DISTRO_ARCHDIR" -- it will be the same as the line in the first Code box earlier in this post.
3. Change it by adding i386-linux-gnu between the single quotation marks, so that it looks like the second Code box in this post.
4. Save the file.
5. Now try installing VLC Player again, and see if it installs without messing up your icons again.
If it works, it may save you from seeing your icons go crazy again when you install some future Ubuntu package. If it doesn't work, well . . . you get the fun of installing Puppy again!
Good luck.