Re: How can I refresh Etch completely?
On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 06:54:36PM -0500, Dennis G. Wicks wrote:
>
> I think I have something basically wrong with my system.
> I upgraded from Sarge according to the instructions but I have
> had all sorts of problems with it.
>
> It seems to me that either something got corrupted during
> the upgrade, there is something left over from Sarge that
> shouldn't be, or there is the wrong version of a library
> somewhere.
>
> Is this a clue? When I try to use aptitude it wants to remove
> 150+ "unused" packages, including Gnome. Doesn't feel right
> to me so I don't use it.
This could be a clue. Use aptitude interactivly; just start it without
any options. If you've never done that before, you may also want the
aptitude user's guide in aptitude-doc. If your package system is
inconsistant you probably don't want to use it to install aptitude-doc.
So use a browser and search on the debian web site for the package, and
download the deb. Then use mc to look inside and run lynx from there.
Don't have mc? Pitty. Debs are sort of a special-format tarball and
there is some way to untar them but I forget how.
Within the aptitude user-interface you can go down the list of packages,
and hit 'g' and it will tell you what it wants to do and to some extent
why. You can cancel with 'q' to go back to the main list.
You could also send us your sources.list just in case there's a problem
there.
>
> Any way, any ideas short of the old Windows stand by,
> "Format the hard drive and reinstall"?
If you truely need to purge every package and reinstall, it's probably
faster to do a total reinstall.
It could also be hardware like bad memory or power supply. I find that
Etch uses more memory than Sarge, perhaps you're using a spot of memory
that you haven't before.
Good luck,
Doug.
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