I noticed Anjuta wouldn't startup because of something wrong with libgtk-x11 something or other, so I decided to try to fix it with an apt-get upgrade. It's been a while since the last time I did that, so it downloaded about 300 MB of packages. It started installing, but then when it got to gstreamer it froze. I killed it and it continued until it got to "updating firefox registry" or something like that when installing firefox. I killed it and it continued. When it got to the end it reported that several packages (most of them depending on gsteamer) couldn't be installed. I tried closing firefox and trying again, but it didn't work. When I tried to reopen firefox I got all sorts of fun error messages (stuff like g_assert() not found). I rebooted to see if that'd help, but now Gnome won't even start. Anyone have any ideas how to get this straightened out besides completely reinstalling Debian?

Try reinstalling gstreamer?

A simple

apt-get -f install

will fix an amazing lot of things that can FDGB during install. Try it from a pure text console so that no parts of X or Gnome are running.

If that doesn't produce good results, try what Fruny suggested:

apt-get --reinstall install mozilla-firefox whatever-package-gstreamer-failed-on

gstreamer seems to follow the Gnome policy of having as many separate libraries and bits of packages as humanly and technologically possible, so that might take a while to find. Removing the libgstreamer0.8 package and then reinstalling whatever gets removed in the process might be a good method.

(edit) Yeah, I know that GStreamer doesn't have squat to do with Gnome, but looking at the sheer mass of packages, it damn near looks like it [grin]

[Edited by - Shadowdancer on April 11, 2005 3:53:26 PM]

Tried all that, but it didn't work. I get a bunch of errors that all seem to say "undefined symbol: g_assert_warning"

Edit: wtf?! I kept googling until I found someone with similar troubles who had a bunch of glib stuff installed in /usr/local/lib, which isn't where Debian keeps that junk. I did rm libg* and magically everything worked. I don't know how it got there, but it's gone now, and now everything seems to be working.

Wait, why am I in KDE?

Edit again: Oh, back in gnome, but something's not right. The fonts are all different (they looke like what they looked like in KDE! ARG!) and there's no icons for anything. Whenever I run something I get lots of errors about not recognizing png files. I installed libpng2 but that didn't help.

Edit #3: ok, I reinstalled libgtk2.0-bin and it did something to the gdk pixbuf paths (or something like that). Firefox is still using KDE fonts, though, even after I reinstalled it.

[Edited by - BradDaBug on April 11, 2005 5:39:34 PM]

dpkg -a --configure

That should configure any packages that didn't finish installing.