Re: Verry disapointing
Bill wrote:
I installed unstable a couple of months ago. I was verry impressed.
About 2 weeks ago I used apt-get to update and upgrade, after I lost
my lan and sound. Ok, it was unstable. I then attempted to download
the sid package to reinstall. The disk I downloaded, wouldn't boot. I
tried a different pc and re downloaded, same results. I gave up on
unstable and downloaded a disk to install testing. That disk wouldn't
boot ether. I figured it might be my system so I used the origonal
disk I used to install testing a couple of months ago and it work'd
fine. I couldn't use unstable which was disapointing but I understand
unstable is unstable. Tonight I wanted to update my installation
because I havn't since I had installed it. after apt-get update and
upgrade, not only have I lost my lan and sound again but kde is no
longer an option when booting.
Any Ideas?
When you run into problems with Debian, you don't need to reinstall,
like you needed to in the Windows world. (Having said that, it's
sometimes easier to reinstall than to fix.)
IIRC, the unstable installer is broken, or it may be that your
downloaded ISO is getting corrupted in the download (check against the
md5 sums) or you're burning the ISOs as files instead of images. At any
rate, you'd be better off to start with the new sarge installer instead
of using an unstable installer, install just the base install, and from
there upgrade to unstable.
Losing your LAN and sound almost certainly indicates a problem with
modules, and/or an upgrade to a newer kernel. As a general rule,
upgrades to newer kernels don't happen without the sysadmin specifically
asking for kernel upgrades.
Run "lspci" to see what chipsets you have in your LAN card and in your
soundcard. Armed with that info, you should be able to run "modprobe" to
load the appropriate modules for those devices. There are other ways to
do it, but using "modprobe" should prepare the system to load the
modules automatically on future reboots.
After loading the sound module, your sound will probably start working.
After loading the LAN module, you'll probably have to restart networking
with "/etc/init.d/networking restart".
When you say that "kde is not longer an option when booting", what
exactly do you mean? Are you logging in at a text console, or in a GUI
login screen? Is this the way you've always done it? If a GUI login
screen, which one (you may need to switch to a text console with
Ctrl-Alt-F2, login, and run "ps ax | grep dm" to see if you see xdm,
wdm, gdm, or kdm; Alt-F7 should get you back to the GUI login). When you
login, does any X startup (via a GUI, or via "startx")? Do you have a
drop-down option for other environments/window managers in the GUI
login, such as icewm or blackbox or gnome?
--
Kent
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