[imported from my old site, not a new post (if that’s important)]

I will prob­a­bly expand on this at some stage, so for now it’s going to be short, but I recently put Debian onto a Sun Netra, which was pretty cool, but I decided to cross-grade from Debian to Ubuntu which I’ve done before with­out hav­ing any issues, and I ran into issues. Tons of them in fact. But only one was bad enough that I almost gave up, and by bad enough I mean that any­body who is good with dpkg would have solved this quickly but no mat­ter how hard I searched (at first), all I could find was whin­ing about how if you have this prob­lem it’s your own fault because you’ve mixed Debian and Ubuntu, but not giv­ing any clues as to how to solve the prob­lem. I had mixed the two, but I also hadn’t. My /etc/apt/sources.list had only Ubuntu sources, but some of the soft­ware on the machine was Debian. Any­way to get to the point if you have this problem:

Selecting previously deselected package sysvutils.
(Reading database ... 168107 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sysvutils (from .../sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Then please fix it by doing the following:

$ sudo dpkg --force-overwrite -i /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb(Reading database ... 168508 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sysvutils (from .../sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ...
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/last.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/lastb.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man8/pidof.8.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man8/killall5.8.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/last', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/mesg', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/sbin/killall5', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/lastb', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/bin/pidof', which is also in package sysvinit
Setting up sysvutils (2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9) ...

And when you are done, thank these guys.

Updated: it appears that some­body other than me is actu­ally read­ing my web­site, so I wanted to make a point of not­ing that the prob­lem I had was exactly as above, but obvi­ously not with i386 debs, so please don’t try fix­ing it exactly as pasted above, but rather apply that to a sparc64 setup. I’m kinda think­ing that if you’re hav­ing this issue then you already knew that, but I had to men­tion it :)