Recovering from a failed .deb installation

On Ubuntu or Debian, if you don't have the necessary packages listed in the "Installing on Ubuntu 6.10" notes then OSS will likely fail to install and
you will need to do the following to recover:

1) cd /var/lib/dpkg/info
2) rm oss-linux*
3) edit /var/lib/dpkg/status and look for oss-linux
and delete the entire section that looks like:

Package: oss-linux
Status: install ok installed
Priority: extra
Section: alien
Installed-Size: 8440
Maintainer: root
Architecture: amd64
Version: v4.0rc9-999
Depends: libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.12.1), libc6 (>= 2.4-1), libcairo2 (>= 1.2.4), libfontconfig1 (>= 2.3.0), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.12.0), libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.10.3), libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.14.5), libx11-6, libxcursor1 (>> 1.1.2), libxext6, libxfixes3, libxi6, libxinerama1, libxrandr2, libxrender1
Conffiles:
/etc/oss.conf 055432d38aaf37fc6de3dba4a95accc3
Description: Open Sound System sound drivers for Linux
Open Sound System for Linux (OSS/Linux) is a commercial quality sound driver
distributed by 4Front Technologies (http://www.opensound.com). OSS provides
support for practically all sound cards on the market including PnP and
many PCI ones. Installation and configuration is higly automated and easy to
perform. To obtain technical support and additional features, you will need to
order a license key from http://www.opensound.com/order.html

(Converted from a rpm package by alien version 8.64.)

5) Now you should be able to run dpkg --purge oss-linux and it should
say: dpkg - warning: ignoring request to remove oss-linux which isn't installed.

6) Finally run dpkg -i oss-linux_v4.0rc9-999_amd64.deb and now it should succeed.