Sorry about this. This I think is the first time ever I'd had a problem with apt. tried to open synaptic as root, and it opened, and about 3 secs later crashed. then tried an apt-get update, which normally takes about 30 mins on dialup. It got as far as the core/updates/5/i386/ filelists.xml , which is the last to be dl'd. I don't know how far it got, but then saw a newline. Segmentation faultsts... 0% There was an update for apt on 26 Nov, but I have run apt-get update, and got further updates 2 times after the update to apt. Is it likely that I need to rebuild the rpmdb, and if so, would someone kindly give me the necessary incantations to run on the command line. Thanks. Nigel.
