HELP -- dist-upgrade gives black screen

[joneall]

A while ago, I tried to install wine: sudo apt-get install wine. At some point (I was not watching closely), the terminal window went black.

I finally killed the terminal process, and tried to remove wine. I had various lock problems. After consulting the Internet, I deleted a lock file. Now dist-upgrade just gives me a black screen at a point I do not have time to note.

Also:

$ sudo apt-get autoremove
[sudo] password for jon:
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

I have rebooted the computer since the initial problem.

I have no idea how to go about solving this problem. Help, please.

[joneall]

I have rebooted the computer and been able to run sudo apt-get autoremove.

But when I try a dist-upgrade, I get a mesage I do not have time to read and then the black screen. I tried script and tail to no avail.

[joneall]

The last lined in /var/log/dpkg.log are

2012-11-20 19:06:15 startup archives unpack
2012-11-20 19:06:16 upgrade ttf-mscorefonts-installer 3.4ubuntu3 3.4ubuntu3
2012-11-20 19:06:16 status half-installed ttf-mscorefonts-installer 3.4ubuntu3

What in the world does that mean? I remember this is the package that wine complained about.

[joneall]

$ dpkg -l ttf-mscorefonts-installer
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Description
+++-============================-============================-================================================== ======================
iHR ttf-mscorefonts-installer 3.4ubuntu3 (no description available)

[joneall]

I have discovered the thread at

http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...onts-installer

and tried the use of

sudo apt-get purge ttf-mscorefonts-installer
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

What seems to be happening is that the stupid EULA screen just shows up as a totally black screen. By doing a series of tabs and CRs, I managed to get past it.l The package was installed, but said that I had not accepted the EULA. How was I to know, with only a black screen in front of me.

So i purged the package. Now dist-upgrade politely tells me there is nothing to install.

Why are the mscorefonts such a mess to install?

[james147]

Why are the mscorefonts such a mess to install?

Because it the microsoft fonts...

If it is just a licence agreement then try just hitting enter at the black screen (I think the default is to accept), you could also try installing ncurses (what most things use to display in terminal dialogs) and see if that helps.

[joneall]

Thanks, James. I will give that a try.