On Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:29:35 -0400
Haines Brown via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> A new installation of Devuan daedalus, but I installed packages
> as needed until now. Suddenly installation of packages fails.
> For example I installed alsa-utils, but the installation was
> broken. No sound, but more signifacantly the changes I made
> to the alsamixer interface were not saved.
>
> I purged alsa-utils and tried to reinstall it:
>
> # apt-get install alsa-utils
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree... Done
> Reading state information... Done
> The following package was automatically installed and is no longer
> required:
> linux-image-6.1.0-10-amd64
> Use 'apt autoremove' to remove it.
> The following additional packages will be installed:
> libatopology2 libfftw3-single3
> Suggested packages:
> dialog libfftw3-bin libfftw3-dev
> The following NEW packages will be installed:
> alsa-utils libatopology2 libfftw3-single3
> 0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
> 1 not fully installed or removed.
> Need to get 0 B/1,954 kB of archives.
> After this operation, 5,083 kB of additional disk space will be used.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
>
> : Writing of cache data failed: No such file or directory
> ldconfig: Can't stat /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu: No such file or
> directory
> ldconfig: Path `/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu' given more than once
> ...dozens of lines then finally:...
> ldconfig: Writing of cache data failed: No such file or directory
> dpkg: error processing package libc-bin (--configure):
> installed libc-bin package post-installation script subprocess
> returned error exit status 1
> Errors were encountered while processing:
> libc-bin
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
>
> I frali to make much sense of this. Is it a library or cache that is
> missing?
>

Hi,
it seems to me that a previous installation of libc-bin failed
and apt is trying to run the --configure again.
Maybe something is wrong also in

/etc/ld.so.conf

cat /etc/ld.so.conf
include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf

or in the /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ dir, on my box it contains:

ls -la /etc/ld.so.conf.d/
total 36
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Jun 15 00:33 .
drwxr-xr-x 170 root root 12288 Jun 23 21:00 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    38 Jun 25  2018 fakeroot-x86_64-linux-gnu.conf
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    44 Mar 21  2016 libc.conf
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   100 May  1  2019 x86_64-linux-gnu.conf
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    56 May  1  2019 zz_i386-biarch-compat.conf
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    58 Oct  2  2021 zz_x32-biarch-compat.conf

for i in $(ls -1 /etc/ld.so.conf.d/); do cat /etc/ld.so.conf.d/$i; done
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfakeroot
# libc default configuration
/usr/local/lib
# Multiarch support
/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
# Legacy biarch compatibility support
/lib32
/usr/lib32
# Legacy biarch compatibility support
/libx32
/usr/libx32

also the output of:

ldconfig -v

could give some info on what is wrong.

Hope this helps,
Ciao,
Tito