Getting apt-get to work

From NAS-Central Iomega Wiki

Warning: This modification can stop the possibility to add and remove users via the webinterface, and to access protected folders (login needed) via the webinterface, depending on the packets you install. So far it looks the packet 'password' is resposible for this.

After having got telnet and root access it's quite easy to get apt-get to work. It's already present, there are only some directories missing. Here is what you need to do:

 su
 mkdir /var/lib/apt/lists
 mkdir /var/lib/apt/lists/partial
 mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives
 mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial
 mkdir /var/lib/dpkg/updates
 mkdir /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives
 mkdir /var/lib/dpkg/info
 touch /var/lib/dpkg/status
 touch /var/lib/dpkg/available
 touch /var/lib/dpkg/diversions

When you got shell-access using timtim's orginal update, you also need to do:

 echo nascentral\:\!\:\: >>/etc/gshadow

(Without the last line sooner or later you'll get a problem configuring passwd)

The Lenny repositories are deprecated, meanwhile, so you'll have to edit /etc/apt/sources.list to change the urls:

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

new contents:

 deb http://archive.debian.org/debian lenny main contrib non-free
 deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian lenny main contrib non-free
 deb http://archive.debian.org/backports.org lenny-backports main contrib non-free

The first packet I installed was *of course* midnight commander:

 apt-get update
 apt-get install mc

This errorred out with: E: Internal Error, Could not perform immediate configuration (2) on libc6

The remedy:

 cd /var/cache/apt/archives
 dpkg -i libc6_2.7-18lenny4_armel.deb

 --- OR for firmware 2.64 ---

 cd /var/cache/apt/archives
 dpkg -i libc6_2.7-18lenny7_armel.deb

After that everything seemed to work fine.

Warning: It's not a good idea to run 'apt-get dist-upgrade' to upgrade to Squeeze.

Squeeze' udev doesn't run well on this old kernel, but udev is necessary to load the firmware of the NIC. So after upgrading to Squeeze your box will still boot, but won't have network. However, there is a way

Troubleshooting

These are obstacles I faced when doing this on a clean-installed hard drive to 2.064 (in September 2011).

• Make sure the files you touch weren't already present as directories. If they are, rmdir them, then touch them again, to make files.
• apt-get often got 404 Not Found on http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ resources.
  • Add a couple of extra locations to /etc/apt/sources.list, from this list http://www.debian.org/mirror/list and run apt-get update
  • If you get got NO_PUBKEY trouble, get and add the keys to apt-get:

You should run the following to fix it (substitute F1D53D8C4F368D5D with the one from your error message):

gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv F1D53D8C4F368D5D
gpg --export --armor F1D53D8C4F368D5D | apt-key add -

- Source: http://muzso.hu/2007/05/25/how-to-fix-no_pubkey-errors-in-apt-get-update-operations

The following problems seemed to appear in March 2012. Here's what I did to fix them.

• 404s regularly hit and can't install anything, and get Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing

If you get the system whinging about LOCALES and LANGUAGE lots, then fix it doing the following.

apt-get install locales
dpkg-reconfigure locales

and run through the wizard, selecting the locales you'll use, then the default locale.