Question

0

Xubuntu: "desktop-file-utils" stopped being able to be installed

rated 0 times [ 0] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 514 / 3 Years ago, fri, july 23, 2021, 5:03:02

After doing some package installs, the desktop-file-utils package is now failing to be installed via apt and aptitude. This is for Xubuntu 20.04.2.

When running apt, I now always get this error:

dpkg: error processing package desktop-file-utils (--configure):

 installed desktop-file-utils package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1

Errors were encountered while processing:

 desktop-file-utils

I know that I can purge this package, but then quite a few of its dependencies will also be uninstalled, and my system is likely to become unusable.

I don't understand what could have caused this problem, because I don't know what I could have done to affect this package.

Is there some way to fix this other than purging desktop-file-utils and making my system unusable? Also, is there some way where I can get more detailed information about exactly how the post-installation script is failing? If so, perhaps I could debug this.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions.

Answers

Only authorized users can answer the question. Please sign in first, or register a free account.

njuash

Add To Favorites

Follow

Total Points: 402

Total Questions: 125

Total Answers: 98

Location: Jersey

Member since Sun, Dec 4, 2022

1 Year ago

njuash questions

1 Install Microsoft Teams for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Wed, Jun 8, 22, 11:53, 2 Years ago

1 ubuntu nvidia driver installation fails

Wed, Nov 30, 22, 11:42, 2 Years ago

1 Ubuntu 22.04 autoinstall pxe not getting user-data

Mon, May 30, 22, 04:33, 2 Years ago

1 dolphin-emu no longer works on Ubuntu 22.04

Mon, Apr 10, 23, 03:40, 1 Year ago

1 Gnuplot on Ubuntu from Microsoft Store, can't open x11 window

Mon, May 9, 22, 08:49, 2 Years ago

View All

answered 3 Years ago nquirewha · Accepted Answer

It turns out that this has nothing to do with packages nor with the apt system.

I discovered that I had accidentally set XDG_DATA_DIRS to point to a non-existent directory.

Once I fixed this, the problem went away.

Here are more details as to why this fixed the problem ...

These are the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/info/desktop-file-utils.postinst ...

#!/bin/sh



set -e



update-desktop-database -q



if [ "$1" = "triggered" ]; then

    exit 0

fi

I ran update-desktop-database -q from the command line, and it didn't give any output, but it exited with a non-zero return code.

I ran it again like this: update-desktop-database -v. This time, it gave an error message which stated that the applications subdirectory of the path that is contained in XDG_DATA_DIRS didn't exist. This showed me that I had set XDG_DATA_DIRS incorrectly.

Once I reset XDG_DATA_DIRS to a proper value, the update-desktop-database command started exiting with a zero return code, and the desktop-file-utils error in apt that I mentioned above stopped occurring.