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Jan
Asked: 2011-08-19 12:37:45 +0800 CST

Is there a Ubuntu sanity check?

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Is there a standard procedure to 'unit test' an Ubuntu system against the deb packages?

Assume, a system has ubuntu-desktop installed according to the package manager. Can I find out, whether the file system has all the files in ubuntu-desktop and dependencies?

related question: Find packages with corrupted files

package-management

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    For the most part, deb packages come with a md5 file containing signatures of all files in the package. These files are located at /var/lib/dpkg/info/$pkg.md5sums.

    To simplify the periodic check of all installed packages, the debsums package can be of help. Install it, clean the cache with:

    sudo apt-get clean

    then run sudo debsums_init to generate md5 sums for packages that do not provide them (the packages are downloaded to generate such sums).

    Next, edit the file /etc/default/debsums and set CRON_CHECK=weekly to configure a cron weekly job for the check of debsums.

    You can run the check manually with the command:

    sudo debsums -cs

    Regarding the integrity of the dependencies, I suppose that the command:

    sudo apt-get -f install

    should signal and try to resolve any problem it finds relative to installed packages, but the Debian/Ubuntu package management system is a very complex object, and could be very difficult to find and resolve its problems.

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