Re: etch upgrade problem

[Florian Kulzer <florian.kulzer@icfo.es>]

On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 09:41:06 -0500, Seth Goodman wrote:
> I've started an upgrade from Sarge to Etch through the Synaptic Package
> manager under Gnome.  The package repositories all look for stable.  I
> selected the "normal" level of questions from the terminal interface.
> 
> It was going well, but now XScreenSaver activated and it does not accept
> my password, so I can't get back to the ongoing update.  Running Putty
> from a nearby windows box does let me log in as that user, so PAM still
> works.  Directly logging in as root remotely (to my surprise, SSH
> allowed this) and running "who" does show the user running Synaptic, but
> how do I get back to the running instance of Synaptic?
> 
> I'm not sure what caused the problem, but I'm thinking of either the
> change in graphics environment or my choosing to select the keyboard
> rather than telling it not to touch the previous selection.  If I select
> "new login" at the screensaver prompt, that also fails trying to load
> various font packages, so I can't determine if the keyboard map is
> proper.  If I hit the caps lock key, the screensaver does suggest I
> check for caps lock, so the keyboard works at least a little.
> 
> Some additional info.  Before the screensaver came on, I did notice a
> long series of warnings concerning what looked like a failure to set the
> three locale settings for PERL.  These same warnings repeated for quite
> a few packages.  I think my settings were both US-English and UK-English
> for language, locale_all unset and I forget the third variable.  It's
> all on the terminal display behind the screensaver :)

You can try to kill the screen saver and/or the screen lock. Log in as
your normal user via ssh (or with CTRL-ALT-F1 etc. if that still works)
and run

ps ux

This will list all your user's processes. There should be one with
"screensaver" or "lock" in its name/command. You can terminate a process
with the "kill" command, specifying its PID (the number in the second
column of the "ps ux" output) as the argument. However, if I kill the
screen lock process on my KDE system then the whole X session is
terminated; I assume this is a security measure. Therefore you should
only try this if you are sure that synaptic has finished whatever it was
doing, to avoid bringing your system in an even more inconsistent state.

If you cannot kill the screen lock without bringing down the X session
then we can tell you how to complete the upgrade and then resurrect your
X from the command line.

-- 
Regards,
          Florian