Baffled by a badly borked system
Hi,
I'm not sure where to start. I'm running Sid. The system has been up
for several days, with numerous hibernate (suspend to disk) / resume
cycles. The system is partially up to date (not totally, since I only
have intermittent net access). Today, I rebooted it, and now it is
badly borked. I have no idea what the root cause of the problem is,
and what are merely symptoms, and I don't even know if there's just
one problem or many. The Debian installation currently has no net
access, so I'm mailing from Windows, and supplying information from
memory, so I may be imprecise.
a) /dev/null apparently has the wrong permissions (I think rw-rw----).
My ordinary user has no access to it, and so lots of stuff complains
(e.g. on initial shell login, I get an endless stream of permission
errors for /dev/null, and I need to hit break.) This problem doesn't
exist for root, probably because root has r/w access to it.
b) X won't start, neither from my ordinary user account or from root.
Several errors (EE), including a reference to insufficient video RAM,
something about DRI, etc.
c) My wireless NIC comes up wrongly named. I had udev set up to
switch my b43 driven card from wlan0 to eth0; now it comes up as
wlan0.
d) b43 driver doesn't work; complaints about firmware (a common b43
gotcha, but it was working fine yesterday).
e) I can't build or even configure kernels or modules. Even make
menuconfig fails, complaining that I need ncurses-dev, which I
certainly have, and which used to work fine. Building also fails,
with various unhelpful errors
What could be so badly wrong with my system? Could an incomplete
upgrade be causing all this havoc? I tried manually upgrading some
key packages (manual downloading into Windows, mounting the Windows
partition and installing via dpkg), but no luck.
Apologies in advance if Gmail mangles this message or doesn't wrap it
correctly; I generally use a proper MUA, but I'm fairly desperate now.
Thanks,
Celejar
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