@karel As Zanna is still a little caught up I have reopened. Normally I would not act on a message to another Mod but this time...

@andrew.46 Thanks. I closed the question again as a duplicate question.

Complete beginner question, but does anyone know how to run multi-line if-else commands?

Specifically, I found this askubuntu.com/questions/648736/… which is the same error I've got, but I don't know how to run the piece of code in the top answer.

@A.B. Looks like that command has only been separated with the '\' character which simply allows a single line of text to be represented on multiple lines. So it is one command, if not a very complex one :)

According to the Launchpad bug this command:

'What this does is to extract the contents of the .deb file, remove everything but the filenames, and write these to the .list file.'

It looks like my question is getting downvotes and close votes because I didn't provide an error message that I have no way to get. What can I do to avoid this?

Well, at least a screenful of messages, I should say.

@Kodiologist its a bit overkill unless you got another reason but - I tend to use a (cheap) video capture card (that I have for other things) to document pre OS boot stuff

And its a bit difficult to step through a problem with no details :/

No capture card, alas.

I honestly don't know how or where to start debugging. That's why I asked.

hm

hmm

Yeah, I thought that if I saw that message on screen, it would at least be in one of the archived copies of dmesg. Maybe that means it's not really a dmesg?

oops

I thought it started with one of those characteristic 0-based timestamps.

ugh

I know I had some wierd problem that would be useful

dmesg command?

superuser.com/questions/1081851/see-the-systemd-boot-logs might be useful soon

Oh cool, maybe journalctl --list-boots and journalctl --boot=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx will do it. Thanks.

I'll have to reproduce the problem again so I know a boot event in which it happened.

yw. Ironically I wish I could be more help but my boxes are fairly well behaved...

I haven't had fun like "dodgy NIC bricking any pc its in" in years

Glad to hear it. I'm really a software guy, so for any problem involving hardware even a little, I tend to flounder.

I added some logs to the question.

@andrew.46 Thanks very much, that worked!

Got another problem now, though. It's refusing to do the "download". At least sometimes. I tried it on "outguess", and it worked. Then I tried it on "python-zeitgeist", which is the package that I'd most recently got that error about, and though the .deb file turned up in my "home" folder, it did not turn up in /var/cache/apt/archives/, so the code didn't work.

Anyone know what might be going on there? And would just copying the file into /var/cache/apt/archives/ work, or might that break things?