On 7/11/05, Patrick McCabe <patrickm at citilink.com> wrote:
> After years of using mostly Mandrake, I have finally decided to make the
> jump to Debian. I am actually using Ubuntu (Kubuntu) at the moment - I
> thought it would make for an easier transition.

Ubuntu makes a really nice desktop system, probably an easy transition
from Mandrake like you say.

> I am trying to install packages and some of them fail with MD5 errors,

If I'm not mistaken, Ubuntu uses round robin DNS just like Debian
does.  Sometimes a particular mirror will be syncing a package or
something else that could cause a momentarily corrupt package. 
Usually when I get any sort of download error, I try the download a
couple times (in theory, a different server every time).  If that
fails, I wait an hour and try again.  It's rare that I get a package
that refuses to download.  And of course, 'apt-get update' regurlary.

> I was trying to download synaptic. What should I do at this point? Is
> there a way around this problem?

You could try manually browsing out to a mirror and downloading it. 
It's a bit of a pain to manually md5sum it, but you can determine
whether or not the package is broke or part of apt is broke.  md5sum
may be broken, or worst case you may have a trojaned md5sum binary.

> -How can I see what files a package contains?

Not sure, haven't needed that yet.

> -How do I determine what package I need for a particular program? I want
> to get ncftpget but I don't know the package it comes in.

'apt-cache search ncftp'

> Thanks. I know I have a lot of reading to do...

between apt and dpkg, you should find all the tools you need to
wrangle your packages.  Good luck.

-Brian