Krdytkyu

So, during a minor update earlier, I noticed that npm wasn't working, so I began updating packages. I landed on this similar issue, so went on to get aptitude installed. Somehow, that installation failed as well. Everything I tried resulted in pages of this error:

E: The method driver /usr/lib/apt/methods/http could not be found.

So after a bunch of more messing around, i had aptitude uninstall itself, which it did. But this left me with no aptitude OR apt.

I tried to download a few of these and install them with dpkg but it fails due to just an endless list of missing dependencies.

# dpkg -i apt_1.7.0_i386.deb 

(Reading database ... 151349 files and directories currently installed.)

Preparing to unpack apt_1.7.0_i386.deb ...

Unpacking apt:i386 (1.7.0) over (1.7.0) ...

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of apt:i386: 

 apt:i386 depends on libapt-pkg5.0 (>= 1.7.0~alpha3~).

 apt:i386 depends on libc6 (>= 2.15).

 apt:i386 depends on libgcc1 (>= 1:4.2).

 apt:i386 depends on libgnutls30 (>= 3.5.6).

 apt:i386 depends on libseccomp2 (>= 1.0.1).

 apt:i386 depends on libstdc++6 (>= 5.2).



dpkg: error processing package apt:i386 (--install):

 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.27-3ubuntu1) ...

Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.3-2) ...

Errors were encountered while processing:

 apt:i386

I tried snap, but it had a x509 error, so I kind of gave up on that as well.

Can someone help me de-muck this stuff up? All the google searching I've done so far can't tell that I'm trying to re-install apt-get, and thinks I want to use apt-get to install stuff.

Ubuntu 18.04.1LTS, by the way. On a live server, 300 miles away.

EDIT: So, this server has mostly been restored to it's initial state and I got npm/nvm/pm2 working again. Checking the new logs (and old logs) I see that the root of all these issues was a failure of the certificate authority. Somewhere, in some process, something didn't download over https, and in troubleshooting the failed installation, I likely caused the rest of this mess.

I'm not OP, but I worked on the machine in question just now and figured it's best to put the solution here in case anyone else has the same problem in the future.

I first got a copy of the apt package he removed (1.6.3 instead of 1.7). This gave me a missing dependency of libgcc1.4.9, which I went and fetched. libgcc complained about not having gcc-4.9-base, which I then went and found. gcc-4.9-base installed without issue. libgcc had a conflict in /usr/local/doc/libgcc1 , so I removed what was already there and reinstalled the dependency. Then apt installed without issue. I was able to "apt list" without issue, and handed the machine back to mainstreetmark.