Ubuntu – Reinstall postfix on ubuntu with installer

Oh, I fixed the problem by following the information in this forum:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=666018

Basically, I looked in my /var/log/mail.log error file and found the error message "unable to look up public/pickup: no such file or directory".

I then issued the command

sudo mkfifo /var/spool/postfix/public/pickup

I made sure sendmail wasn't still running by doing a ps -aux and killing it

root@cpu:/var/log# ps aux | grep mail
root      2363  0.0  0.5   9228  1888 ?        Ss   Jan28   0:20 sendmail: MTA: accepting connections          
root     23914  0.0  0.2   3040   792 pts/0    S+   11:33   0:00 grep mail
root@cpu:/var/log# kill 2363

I restarted postfix

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart

And now the PHP mail function works.

The problem is that apt/dpkg can't look inside the image files for the .deb package files. You need to get the .deb files themselves to your USB source.

I would do this as follows:

1. Install Ubuntu server on another computer (or into an empty partition or into a virtual machine) that does have a network connection.
2. Run 'aptitude clean' to clear out the package directory at /var/cache/apt/archives
3. Run 'aptitude install xfce'
4. /var/cache/apt/archives will now have the .debs you need. Copy these over to your drive and run the install on the original computer.

There's also a program called apt-offline that that handles this kind of situation but probablly not worth learning for just one install.