Warnings from Engage

When you click on Engage, lim performs a number of sanity checks before installing and/or uninstalling any packages. Most of these are warnings which you can choose to ignore, but you do have the option of cancelling the whole thing at any time.

Duplicate Actions

lim checks to see if you are installing or uninstalling something twice.

Already Installed

lim checks to see if you are installing a package that is already installed (possibly different version). This is usually OK for source packages. For binary packages this is probably a bad idea -- the filenames of different versions of the same binaries are usually not unique, and you can imagine the possible implications of two packages ``owning'' the same file.

Critical Packages

lim also checks to see if you are uninstalling any critical packages. These are packages that are so important that if you actually uninstall them, things can go horribly wrong. Some examples of critical packages are libc-linux-shared and bash. If any critical packages are being uninstalled, lim asks you if you want to do a fake uninstall, which removes the installation record, but not the actual files of the package. This is highly recommended. You will probably be uninstalling a critical package only to install a new version, and the new version should install right over the old files.

Disk Usage

Finally, lim checks the the total change in disk usage, given the sizes of the packages you are installing and uninstalling and compares this with the free disk space as reported by df(1). You will be warned if it appears that you do not have enough disk space to accomodate the installation.