Recently (early February) a bunch of new updates to Ubuntu 9.10 appeared in the Ubuntu Update Center and without giving them much attention I simply pressed “Install”. So far nothing unusual. But this time I ended up with a request for “postfix” to be configured, which I ignored, I do not need postfix on my system, and two broken packages: bsd-mailx and lsb-core.
Here are my error messages:
E: /var/cache/apt/archives/postfix_2.6.5-3_i386.deb: subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
and from the update manager
An error occurred, please run Package Manager from the right-click menu or apt-get in a terminal to see what is wrong. The error message was:
'Error: BrokenCount > 0' This usually means that your installed packages have unmet dependencies
I searched and removed bsd-mailx and lsb-core with Synaptic package manager, and by checking the packages dependencies found out that Google Chrome beta was responsible for the installation in the first place.
In fact there were a whole bunch of packages newly installed when I checked:
/var/log/apt/term.log
(lines starting with: Selecting previously deselected package…)
All of these packages where listed as “new install” in the update manager under a section misleadingly called “Distribution Upgrade”.
This is no severe issue (except maybe by mistakenly opening up your system by an imprudent postfix configuration) but rather an annoyance. Personally I resolved the issue by deinstalling the superfluous packages mentioned above and by deinstalling Google Chrome and removing the Google repository from my list of repositories. It is an unfortunate choice, since despite some issues with the Flash plugin, Chrome is a really nice and fast browser. I will try it again with an upcoming release when the package issue has hopefully been resolved.
Of course if you cannot live without Chrome you might resolve this issue differently.
