I have a Dell Mini9 running Ubuntu 8.10. One day I had the bright idea to see if I could install a LAMP stack. I had trouble installing MySQL 5.0. I don't recall the error, but ever since all attempts to run update-manager, synaptic, or apt-get fails with an error about mysql-server-5.0: "Package is in a very bad inconsistent state".
I've tried apt-get remove mysql-server-5.0 and also install but with no luck. Both fail with the same error below. How can I fix this?
$ sudo apt-get remove mysql-server-5.0 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: dhcdbd libisc32 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following packages will be REMOVED: mysql-server-5.0 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 164 not upgraded. 1 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 85.4MB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? dpkg: error processing mysql-server-5.0 (--remove): Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should reinstall it before attempting a removal. Errors were encountered while processing: mysql-server-5.0 E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Best Answer
None of the other answers worked for me on Maverick.
In my case, I found this worked:
(replacing "flashplugin-nonfree" with the name of the broken package, and replacing "prerm" with the type of script that failed - in my case it was "postrm", the post-removal script.)
And they say Ubuntu is easy to use!! grumble grumble