Re: OT - Debian Testing questions

[Conrad Newton <conrad.newton@broadpark.no>]

>From Trond Mæhlum on Monday, 2006-02-20 at 16:31:19 +0100:
> I know this is off topic, but I take the liberty of asking here anyway. 
> I know that the Debian-knowledge here is awesome...
> 
> I run Testing on my laptop, which has been very running very good for a 
> long time. Now some very bad things have happened. During my latest 
> apt-get upgrade, a lot of new packages got pulled in. Most of them were 
> nice, like KDE3.5.
> 
> However both Evolution and xserver-xorg got updated too. Not so good. I 
> use Evolution-Exchange every day at work. Both 2.0 and 2.2 of Evolution 
> work perfectly for me with Exchange plugin. Evolution 2.4 does not. The 
> Exchange plugin got broken. This is also the case in Ubuntu Breezy, 
> which is also using 2.4. The ubuntuforums are full of posts stating that 
> Evolution-Exchange 2.4 is broken.
> 
> I am using a dual monitor setup. I have a Compaq Evo N620c, using the 
> "radeon" driver from X.org. When xserver-xorg got updated to 6.9.0, the 
> dual-head setup broke. I did some googling about this, and found that 
> other users had experienced this as well. The solution that was 
> suggested, was to downgrade xserver-xorg to 6.8.x.

And on my Thinkpad T43, with radeon driver, X is completely broken
ever since 6.9.0, see #345640.  I had a backup, but there are other
ways to correct the problem, see below.  Once you have corrected
the problem, you can see to it that there are no updates to these
packages by putting them on "hold", either with dselect, or with
"aptitude hold ..."  Then everything else will be upgraded, but not
xserver-xorg and company.

To find out _what_ packages you need to downgrade and hold, try this

Downgrade these:

dpkg -l | grep 6.9.0 | awk '{print $2}'

Then keep these on hold:

dpkg -l | grep 6.8.2 | awk '{print $2}'

> Now the question, _how_ would one go about downgrading xserver-xorg? I 
> would also like to downgrade Evolution/Evolution-Exchange to 2.2. But 
> can't to seem to find out how. Since the packages aren't in testing 
> anymore, and neither in Sarge.
> 
> Is there some kind of legacy apt repository for these kind of things?

You bet!  They lost some of their older archives, but they can at
least take you back to last summer:

http://snapshot.debian.net/

A suitable date to reinstall xserver-xorg would be 2005-12-31.

But pick a date, any date, with

deb http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/YYYY/MM/DD/debian unstable main
contrib non-free
deb-src http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/YYYY/MM/DD/debian unstable
main contrib non-free

or pick a a package, any package, with

deb http://snapshot.debian.net/archive pool package ...
deb-src http://snapshot.debian.net/archive pool package ...

Now for the details (untested):
-------------------------------------------------------
for f in $(dpkg -l | grep 6.9.0 | awk '{print $2}'); do
    echo "$f=6.8.2.dfsg.1-11" >> to-be-downgraded
done

apt-get install $(cat to-be-downgraded)
-------------------------------------------------------

Now keep the downgraded packages on hold with a command such as:

aptitude hold $(dpkg -l | grep 6.8.2 | awk '{print $2}')

Now any apt-get upgrades should leave these packages alone.
They will only be upgraded if you explicitly apt-get install them.

> My only other solution would be to reinstall Debian and go for Sarge...

The situation should not be that desperate.

> Can anyone help me out here, even though this isn't truly Debian-Edu
> related?

Let me know if there is a problem with the above.

Conrad