Marc Shapiro wrote:
I am running Sarge and kernel 2.4.24-1-k7. Yesterday I rebooted the system and was then unable to connect to my home network (two boxes) and so I could not connect to the internet (the other box is my gateway). Fortunately, I could boot using the my older kernel (2.4.18-bf2.4) and I could connect just fine. As of today, even that does not work. I have been forced to use the Red Hat that was originally on this machine in order to get access to my network (but this verifies that the problem is NOT hardware).-snip-How about doing apt-get -f install, without listing any packages? This has worked for me. On the preventive side of things, I never run apt-get upgrade, only apt-get dist-upgrade. This ensures that upgraded packages will have any new dependencies they may need, while a simple upgrade will not, possibly leaving you with broken packages. Unless you have a apecific reason not to, I suggest you use only the dist-upgrade.
Thanks.It is working now. Apparently ifup and ifdown mysteriously disappeared from my system, even though dpkg and apt-get both said that ifupdown was installed and was the latest version. I did an apt-get remove ifupdown, then reinstalled it, along with other packages that were removed along with it. After a reboot, everything seems to be in order again.
I do apt-get upgrade instead of dist-upgrade since that will NOT remove anything from my system. If a newer version of an installed package has new dependancies then it should be held back and not installed. This way I don't end up with broken packages, or risk losing something that I did not notice was going to be removed by a dist-upgrade. Last I checked, if I were to do a dist-upgrade, apt-get would remove kate, konsole, and konqueror. I use kate and konsole all of the time, so I would not want them removed. I do not run KDE, but I do use some of the KDE packages, and they frequently use konqueror for their help system, so letting it get removed might cause problems, as well. So, sure, I can put all three of those packages on hold (and I have), but what if I had not noticed that they would be removed. I could have gotten them back, but why take the chance, and the time? Doing an upgrade regularly (I use cron-apt on a nightly basis) seems much safer that doing a dist-upgrade. I'll do the full dist-upgrade when Sarge goes stable.