Re: [Hampshire] X is sick

On Monday 23 April 2007 03:03, Mike Burrows wrote:
> >>Thanks. I don't suppose there is any way i can roll back to
> >> sarge is there?
> >
> >Yes, edit your sources.list file and change them all to sarge, and
> > then try an aptitude uptdate/upgrade, it may be able to fix
> > things. You may have to manually download and forceably install
> > any debs you know you changed. I don't know how easy this will
> > be.
> >
> >The upgrade is pretty painless actually, only 5% of D-A.org
> > members had any serious problems so far from a poll of 304 Debian
> > administrators.
>
> Well I really screwed it up this time. I rolled back the system
> and had it running using kdm but apps like thunderbird would not
> run. So I thought I would have another go at a dist-upgrade.
> During the upgrade, I got the message that the xserver might not
> install. This proved to be the case so I went ahead and tried to
> install xserver-xorg using aptitude install. for some reason the
> system then uninstalled virtually every installed package and of
> course tried to take out the running kernel. I stopped it doing
> that but now when I try a rebuild the system using apt (aptitude
> has been removed) I can't get past the remove the kernel due to
> unmet dependencies thing. Looks like I'm down to buying a new hard
> drive to preserve my data unless there are any other options
>
> HELP!!!!

As long as the machine is booting there are definitely other options.
As a first priority you need to get aptitude installed, even if it
means using 'sarge' in your sources.list instead of 'stable' while
you sort that out.

Once you have aptitude installed it will help you look at why packages
are not wanting to install. You can then try out the potential effect
of upgrading one or two key packages (e.g. xserver-xorg) remembering
that Ctrl-U undoes your most recent action in aptitude. When there
are problems aptitude will show at the bottom of the screen its
preferred solution, and using 'e' ',' and '.' you can ask
it to find alternative strategies. Using 'b' will take you to the
next 'broken' package which you can then examine to see why it's not
happy.

HTH, Peter