Hey, guys...

After hearing some good things about Canola2, I finally decided to take a quickie look at it even though I really don't do much media stuff on my tablet, so I tried to install the package shown in Application Manager on my stock 770 running OS2006 (Version 3.2006.49-2).

Baaaaad idea.

Somewhere in the middle the package installation for the base Canola2 package stopped, and now when I try to install ANYTHING else (either from a local .deb file or from any other repository I've tested thusfar) I get the following message in the Application Manager log:

E: I wasn't able to locate a file for the python2.5-xml package. This might mean you need to manually fix this package. (due to missing arch)

NOTE: I cannot become root on this tablet ... I've not had any reason to yet, so I don't have anything like "becomeroot" installed, and I can't install that package to use apt-get directly because I get the above message when I try to do so.

What kind of a POS package manager leaves things out of synch like this????!? It's enough to make me wish the 770 used RPMs. Or Slackware packages. And no, the aforementioned package is not visible in Application Manager. I'd love to just remove it.

Any advice is appreciated.

Suggestions to simply reflash the device > /dev/null unless substantive supporting arguments are made.

Thanks!

Use the flasher to enable r&d mode, then you can use "sudo gainroot" to become root on the device without needing to install anything.

Then run "apt-get -f" to get it to try to fix itself.

HTH

What is "the flasher"...? I'm very familiar with Linux, but only an end user on these tablets, and I've never done any firmware flashing before. Though learning how to do that is probably in my long-term interest.

Thanks for the suggestion, BTW. Once I understand your instructions, I'll follow them with all speed.

Rich, I would suggest that first you bookmark Google search for this site (ITT). That URL is much more useful than this site's own search, IMO. Note that this Google URL will most likely change in a few months since this forum will be moved under talk.maemo.org domain.

There's also a specific sub-forum for Canola under Apps, but that probably isn't important at the moment.

Anyway, if you go to the above Google's ITT search and enter "770 flasher r&d", the first entries will tell you what the Flasher is, where to get it from and how to use it.

Then you can follow lardman's suggestions to become root and fix the missing/broken python2.5 package. I've seen many others having problems with that package so you might like to do another search about Canola/python2.5/repository.

I wish I could provide more detailed help, especially as I've come across your informative posts about OS/2 and Linux for many, many years!

https://wiki.maemo.org/Flasher

Thanks for the responses, guys. I've been whisked offline recently by a combination of the holidays, my wife, and other occurrences in The Real World(tm), but hopefully I can take a more serious look at this issue this week.

Well, I used the flasher to enable r&d mode, used "sudo gainroot" to become root, and continued the aborted installation of Canola.

When that was done, I used the canola2-cleanup package to remove the crap from the aborted Canola installation that I didn't want anymore. :-)

Somewhere along the way I've lost quite a bit of space on the root filesystem, though, so I'll need to figure out what all got installed that the cleanup utility didn't catch.

At least I can install stuff again! Thanks to everyone for their help...