Thanks Basil,

It worked. But when I went to wrap things up for my style of operating with raspbian LINUX, I tried to install synaptic and xscreensaver. Both attempts started by retrieving and failed at the extracting steps with a "dpkg returned an error code (2)".

Fortunately XASTIR still starts and runs as do other apps, so I am not totally hamstrung.

See error message detail below:

For Synaptic install - when unpacking:
"Selecting previously unselected package libcairo-perl.
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
files list file for package 'rpi-eeprom-images' contains empty filename
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)"

For Xscreensaver install - when unpacking:
"Selecting previously unselected package libglade2-0:armhf.
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
files list file for package 'rpi-eeprom-images' contains empty filename
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)"

I tried several of the dpkg recovery suggestions from online raspbian
help sources, but none did the trick so I could continue with the
installations.Are there any tricks to bring *dpkg* back to its senses
or rebuild the specified files with empty filenames?

Thanks for responding even if I am off topic here...