Ok, I am running my EEE PC 701 off of Xandros, and I removed UnionFs and merged the first two partitions and have been trying to free up some space. I removed the Open Office suite and I then tried to remove "asus-ooo-writer". It came up with:

/home/user> sudo apt-get remove asus-ooo-writer
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
asus-ooo-writer
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 108 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 61.3MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... 73242 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing asus-ooo-writer ...
dpkg-divert: mismatch on divert-to
when removing `diversion of /usr/share/applications/ooo-writer.desktop to /usr/share/applications/ooo-writer.desktop-orig by asus-ooo-writer'
found `diversion of /usr/share/applications/ooo-writer.desktop to /usr/share/applications/ooo-writer.desktop.orig by asus-ooo-writer'
dpkg: error processing asus-ooo-writer (--remove):
subprocess post-removal script returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
asus-ooo-writer
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)


Every time I try to remove a package now, it thinks I'm trying to remove asus-ooo-writer along with it! I went into synaptic and tried to unmark it but it doesn't work! any suggestions!?

Thanks!

It looks like your package manager files may be messed up. Try using dpkg to straighten out the files:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

sudo dpkg --audit

See:

man dpkg

---------------------
Steve Stites

Looks like a package removal script bug to me. I had a similar problem LONG time ago - iirc a remove script that needs to be corrected is in /var/lib/dpkg/info .

sudo dpkg --configure -a does nothing

sudo dpkg --audit shows me that asus-ooo-writer is half installed

man dpkg suggests --purge and --remove BUT nothing seems to work!

Is there no way to fix this problem?

Hello again,

From what I can see from your first post in the error you quote dpkg expects to find '/usr/share/applications/ooo-writer.desktop-orig' in the removal script but instead finds '/usr/share/applications/ooo-writer.desktop.orig' .

If I remember correctly (keep in mind though that I had a similar problem a long, long time ago and I might be wrong) the trick is to fix the script first and then run 'apt-get install -f' as root. The script will be in /var/lib/dpkg/info ,probably under name asus-ooo-writer.postrm

You need to manually remove the divert.

(to see the diversions)
dpkg-divert --list

use dpkg-divert --remove to remove the diversion. If it still complains you can add (dpkg-divert --add) in the diversion its expecting.

Wow, that worked, now the package is completely gone, but I don't care! Thank you all who have posted, but it was 'estabroo' who's idea worked.