Is there a Ubuntu sanity check?

Solution 1:

For the most part, deb packages come with a md5 file containing signatures of all files in the package. These files are located at /var/lib/dpkg/info/$pkg.md5sums.

To simplify the periodic check of all installed packages, the debsums package can be of help. Install it, clean the cache with:

sudo apt-get clean

then run sudo debsums_init to generate md5 sums for packages that do not provide them (the packages are downloaded to generate such sums).

Next, edit the file /etc/default/debsums and set CRON_CHECK=weekly to configure a cron weekly job for the check of debsums.

You can run the check manually with the command:

sudo debsums -cs

Regarding the integrity of the dependencies, I suppose that the command:

sudo apt-get -f install

should signal and try to resolve any problem it finds relative to installed packages, but the Debian/Ubuntu package management system is a very complex object, and could be very difficult to find and resolve its problems.