Bug#633159: Bug 633159: enny->squeeze: TeX breakage, upgrade-from-grub-legacy disables greeter
Hi,
Sorry for my loss of patience after about 15 hours of working on it late into the night. The GUI and greeter are working again. I don't really know what caused the problems. Maybe it's because I maxed out the root partition space, although I didn't see an error about it, or maybe because of the following.
On some of the steps in the upgrade process, it asked if I wanted to keep my modified configuration file or accept the package developer's file, and I always chose the package developer's file. Well, that was probably stupid, and even moreso, that I didn't stop to back up my configuration file. I backed up my user data beforehand, but I had no idea of what system stuff I'd want to keep, and I thought stopping the installation process would cause problems (which it did).
So this screwed things up, for example, my TeX installation is totally broken, looking for files in the wrong places, and I haven't figured out how to fix it yet. I use this software for work, and this made me unable to work or do much else this weekend. This caused many errors, and when I finally found the message buried somewhere that was causing the problem, and was able to reinstall TeX (although it still doesn't work), here's one Debian upgrade behavior that I don't understand.
When I installed TeX-related packages, it asked if I wanted to delete a humongous amount of packages that were new, I think, for the Squeeze release, like deborphan, and other packages I'd never seen before. I would expect that rerunning the entire upgrade process in the steps given in the release notes (which I did repeat) would reinstall all these packages that installing TeX deleted. But I have no idea why it didn't, or what makes the installation process (like apt-get dist-upgrade) think they should be part of Squeeze in the first place. This includes packages like gnome that the GUI needs.
On the second time through, they didn't get installed, and even packages like gnome were missing. I think I reclaimed disk space with "aptitude clean", then tried "apt-get update" and "apt-get dist-upgrade", but it didn't bring these missing packages back. Finally, I found a post in the Debian forums that said someone had a similar problem about losing the GUI, and they typed "startx", so that worked to bring back the GUI, and then -- whew! -- I thought it probably wasn't the video drivers. Some more forum posts seemed to hint that maybe related packages like gnome and X11-related packages were missing. After installing those, and rebooting, the GUI started up automatically.
Anyone who's a little older or less experienced and doesn't have a second computer with Internet access would not be able to figure this out. It's simply not a product for the general public. Quite disappointing. You really have to be ridiculously persistent for it to work, at least if you've made the slightest modifications to package configurations.
Also, there were some ambiguous parts of the documentation, like where it says you should install a new kernel, there was something that made it unclear about whether that was necessary or not. For example, at first it says you should install a new kernel, but then, in section 4.6.1. "Installing the kernel metapackage", it says "If you do not see any output, then you will need to install a new linux-image package by hand." Well, I did see some output, so the way this instruction is phrased left me thinking oh maybe I don't need to install a kernel image. But I checked what the most recent kernel version was by going outside the instruction page. I saw mine was not the most up-to-date, so I did install a newer one. Maybe I didn't need to.
Linda
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