Major problem when installing new version of Xara autopackage

Hi, I think this is an autopackage problem more than a Xara problem, but for some reason when I tried to install the new (latest) version instead of the recommended version, I had the experience of autopackage-gtk starting, saying "initializing ..." and at that point it starts doing so much disk access that I am no longer able to use the computer (the cursor moves but that is about it, I can't switch virtual terminals, I can't even ssh into the machine and kill the process). I think it has something to do with removing the old package as "package list" still shows xaralx after I interrupt this process by physically turning my computer off and on.

I tried this twice with two hard reboots, both times fearing for the data on my hard drive. Finally, I removed autopackag e using "package remove autopackage", deleted all files in /var/package, did a locate autopackage and deleted every single file it came up with, and then it seemed to work okay. Anybody else had this problem? Not sure if it is Xara specific but it is quite serious as it completely hangs up your system.

Btw, I am using Ubuntu 6.06 on a Dell Inspiron 600m, otherwise quite stable.

Misha

I've had no problems whatever with autopackage once installed, on my AMD 64, Fedora Core 5 box, using Gnome and over 1000 TT fonts. Don't understand why you would have a problem.

frank

Yes, I am not sure why I had the problem either. I was quite surprised. It happened specifically when I already had one version of xaralx autopackaged installed and installed another version autopackaged on top of that. Not sure if this is the cause, have not tried to repeat it b/c it was too high stress :) Maybe it is just something weird that happened on my system, but I posted it up anyway in case someone has had a similar problem, in that case it might be something more serious.

The only thing I did learn from this experience is that it would
be _really_ nice to have someway to "purge" autopackage off the system as that ended up being the only way to get rid of the problem by manually deleting every single file that I could find that was part of that system. Some kind of "package --purge-all" or something would be great, but then again since "package remove xaralx" also did not work and would freeze (although could be aborted with a well-timed Ctrl-C), maybe "package --purge-all" would not have worked either.

Misha

Hi Misha,

I think the problem may have been due to running autopackage with a previous version of XaraLX still installed. I always remove the previous version before running the autopackage installer for the latest updated version.

In a terminal windows and as Root user use the command line: package remove xaralx

That should remove the previous version so you can get a clean install of the latest update.

On my systems I don't remove XaraLX before installing a new version using autopackage, no problems. The systems are FC5 32- and 64-bit.

frank

I'm running Slack and don't bother manually removing the old version either.

The problem that was seen here could possibly have been a problem with the old autopackage install. Initially it did some stuff that would take forever to install and update the package database. Quite a few revisions back the whole process was streamlined.

It's possible that the version that was installed was using that older version, and it really was just going to take a long, long time to uninstall.