Upgrading to woody - the saga continues...
This has got to be the longest time without a working system since I
started using Debian in november 1995. Of course, when I say 'working' I
mean 'with a working desktop' - I still have FTP and all non X-related
stuff working, and my system thinks it has completely upgraded OK.
Normally I would have given in and re-installed by now, but I thought
that maybe if I air my problems in this forum, someone else might find
my experiences helpful, so I'll plug on for another week or two, or
until I really need to use my computer again.
Thanks to the tips from Sharninder Singh in response to my earlier post
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200306/msg00484.html
(Problems upgrading from potato to woody).
Your answers (dpkg-reconfigure mc) and (dpkg-reconfigure xserver) were
quite correct, even though the latter didn't succeed in getting X
working. The answer turned out to be a bug in the documentation! On this
page
http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html
I read the following instructions:
If you were upgrading from Debian version 2.0 or earlier, and have the
X Window System installed, give the following commands:
apt-get remove xbase
apt-get install xfonts-base xfonts-75dpi xfonts-100dpi xfonts-scalable
As I was upgrading from potato (Debian version 2.2r0), I thought that
this could be ignored. Sadly, skipping this step means that X refuses to
start (Fatal server error: could not open default font 'fixed'). Maybe
there needs to be a 'depends' in some package or other, but I am not
clued in enough to figure out which package needs to have this. If
anyone with more knowledge could suggest somthing, I'll file a real bug
report against the offending package.
Anyhow, with a simple apt-get, I now have X working, and can move on to
the next problem. Gnome won't start.
I have gdm installed, giving me a login dialog (greeter) in which I
enter a user id and password. Pressing OK would then normally take me to
the Gnome desktop for that user. <slight grumble> the greeter looks a
bit different now, resizing itself between the user id and password
entry, which is slightly irritating. I thought I remembered having two
separate entry fields for id and password, but I could be mistaken
</slight grumble>.
What happens now is that the screen blanks for about a second, then the
greeter comes back again, without logging in. When I look in
~/.gnome-errors, there are a couple of warnings, but one fatal error
which seems to be the root of the problem: the script
/etc/gdm/Sessions/Gnome calls for the execution of another script
/usr/bin/gnome-session, which is sadly missing from my system. Despite
looking through the update instructions, I found no mention of this
script or where it comes from. Anyone have any ideas?
--
Cheers!
.~.
/V\
// \\
/( )\
^`~´^
< hugge >
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