On Sat, Oct 04, 2003 at 05:11:04PM -0400, Jack Dodds wrote: > Help! I had a working install of Woody on my P4. > > Then (probably showing my ignorance) I tried to install a recent version > of Abiword by adding a line specifying /unstable/main to my > /etc/apt/sources.list, and (from a characer mode screen) doing an > > apt-get install abiword. > > This resulted in the upgrading of many packges, and a pile of cryptic > errors. In an attempt to fix these I did an > > apt-get -f install > > which produced many illegal instruction messages. I did what I thought > was a clean shutdown. The next time I rebooted, hda3 (my root > filesystem) failed its boot-time check and was fixed up. > > Giving up, I restored /etc/apt/sources.list to its original contents > (which specifies only stable versions). Then I did an > > apt-get upgrade > By doing this you probably did a partial distribution upgrade to Debian unstable and changed some basic packages like libc6. If you want upgrade to unstable, you should do a "apt-get dist-upgrade". To test the effects of this before doing the dist-upgrade, run "apt-get --simulate dist-upgrade". If all you want to do is install a newer version of a package than exists in the Debian release, you should try to install a backport of the package. One place to look for these is http://www.apt-get.org/. > This got me back more or less to where I started, I think, but now when > the system boots, xdm will not run. I don't use xdm, but look for a xdm-errors or your .xsession-errors file to get more info on what the problem. You may not be back at your starting woody distribution. "cat /etc/debian_version" to see what your distribution is reported as. If you want to try to undo the upgrade, I think you will need to create a /etc/apt/preferences that contains: Package: * Pin: release a=stable Pin-Priority: 1001 see "man apt_preferences" for more details. > > Also, the "sleep" command produces an "illegal instruction" message. It > is used in various scripts, and so on boot up, tty1 is flooded with > these illegal instructions messages so that I can't log in there. I can > do an Alt <F2>, log in, and everything looks normal except that xdm > won't run. > > Now, I could just go back and reload Woody from scratch (if I were > having trouble with Windows, that's what the tech support would > undoubtedly recommend!) Is there a better way? > > Also, was it wrong to add the unstable/main line to sources.list? The > man page for apt-get seems to show that you can request a package from a > different release (e.g. unstable) - is this just a theoretical > possibility or does it really work? Yes, but if you don't want to upgrade your distribution to unstable, you should probably set pin-priorities or run apt-get with options -u or -s. -- Jerome
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