Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
I'm just coming into this, but it sounds like you've tried upgrading both your system to Sarge, and your system to a new kernel. This warning is a little late, but next time you might want to take these two steps separately.Well, no one responded to my posting on how to get apt-get to upgrage to Sarge so took matters in my own hands and installed the virtual kernel-image 2.6.8-10-i686. Even so, lilo wouldn't boot it up until I ran MKINITRD and that didn't run without error. The setup didn't mention this. Is it required? However, my real problem is that I can only access the terminals. My modem, mouse are not recognized. Can't dial out to finish upgrade. X window reports modules pex5, xie do not exist, yet the modules were installed, then uninstalled. /dev/psaux reported as nonexistant or not found. Ran dpkg --configure on gdm, XFree86 which ended in error. The upgrade reconfigured some things I told it use current configuration(buggy?) or is this because I have a lot of upgrading to do before sarge works right. The final error on the X window error messages was: Fatal ????? error failed to initialize core devices. I'm stumped and need some help to resolve this, needing the modem first to continue with the upgrading. Please help. Please copy my email address lenc@ruralcomm.com as I'm not currently subscribed. Many thanks. Leonard PS-I read the postings from Dec 15-18 period and picked up some info on upgrading to sarge but didn't work for me. So I searched the Deb site for the kernel-image and installed.
I'm not sure what you mean by "virtual kernel-image". When I do an "apt-cache search kernel-image-2.6.8", with my sources.list pointing at unstable, I see no version -10; -9 is the highest I've seen. This indicates to me that you're getting your kernel image from some non-Debian source; in such a situation, breakage is not surprising to me. (Of course, I might be misunderstanding something here.)
I don't believe that you should have needed to run "mkinitrd" unless you've compiled your own kernel; at least I've never had to use this utility when I install a standard kernel image.
What do you get when you run "uname -a"? It sounds like you've got a broken kernel, and a broken/unfinished apt-upgrade. I'd try fixing the kernel first, then worry about fixing the upgrade. Can you boot into your old kernel?
If your modem is a real modem, you can probably recover; if it's a win-modem, that requires some driver, you may be looking at a world of hurt, at least until you've got a properly working kernel. If your modem is real, you should be able to set up a connection either with pppconfig or with wvdial; once you have a working connection, you can finish your upgrade.
-- Kent West westk@acu.edu