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Re: Baffled by a badly borked system



On 2008-07-18 22:43 +0200, celejar wrote:

> I'm not sure where to start.  I'm running Sid.  The system has been up
> for several days, with numerous hibernate (suspend to disk) / resume
> cycles.  The system is partially up to date (not totally, since I only
> have intermittent net access).  Today, I rebooted it, and now it is
> badly borked.  I have no idea what the root cause of the problem is,
> and what are merely symptoms, and I don't even know if there's just
> one problem or many.  The Debian installation currently has no net
> access, so I'm mailing from Windows, and supplying information from
> memory, so I may be imprecise.
>
> a) /dev/null apparently has the wrong permissions (I think rw-rw----).
>  My ordinary user has no access to it, and so lots of stuff complains
> (e.g. on initial shell login, I get an endless stream of permission
> errors for /dev/null, and I need to hit break.)  This problem doesn't
> exist for root, probably because root has r/w access to it.

That's http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=491114.

> b) X won't start, neither from my ordinary user account or from root.
> Several errors (EE), including a reference to insufficient video RAM,
> something about DRI, etc.
>
> c) My wireless NIC comes up wrongly named.  I had udev set up to
> switch my b43 driven card from wlan0 to eth0; now it comes up as
> wlan0.
>
> d) b43 driver doesn't work; complaints about firmware (a common b43
> gotcha, but it was working fine yesterday).
>
> e) I can't build or even configure kernels or modules.  Even make
> menuconfig fails, complaining that I need ncurses-dev, which I
> certainly have, and which used to work fine.  Building also fails,
> with various unhelpful errors
>
> What could be so badly wrong with my system?  Could an incomplete
> upgrade be causing all this havoc?  I tried manually upgrading some
> key packages (manual downloading into Windows, mounting the Windows
> partition and installing via dpkg), but no luck.

All of this might be a consequence of a), so please install a working
version of dmsetup, rebuild your initramfs and reboot.

> Apologies in advance if Gmail mangles this message or doesn't wrap it
> correctly; I generally use a proper MUA, but I'm fairly desperate now.

Looks fine here.

Regards,
        Sven


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