Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum wrote:
A while ago i asked for advice about upgrading--i wanted more up to date packages on my Lenny laptop. Thanks to some helpful suggests, i concluded that it was safe to go to unstable. I change /etc/apt/sources.list from lenny to sid, and away i went.Since then things have been ok; sometimes a package i needed broke but it was alwaays back in a day or two.Usually i use Synaptic, but today i ran apt-get from the commandline and it prompted me to remove unnecessary packages, so i ran this and without paying too much attention realized that it had removed 270MB of stuff, including very large chunks of Gnome as being "unnecessary'. Now my box is sort of unusable. Is this some very temporary thing, or did i really bite off more than i could chew? How do i get back to a usable system? Jen
My understanding is that sometimes packages need to get uninstalled to solve dependency issues (in order to properly process a significant upgrade). If you're running unstable/sid, this will happen sometimes. As someone who's used sid/unstable on my main desktop machines for many years I can tell you that most of the time the fix is as simple as reinstalling afterwards. Have you tried yet something like (I've been following the advice to use aptitude instead of apt-get happily for years now also):
aptitude install gnome-desktop-environmentIf you're very unlucky, then that might not be a sufficient answer (and there may be more fiddling/waiting necessary before you're back up and running). Sorry I'm not a gnome power user (I prefer KDE) so I can't help with specifics (but I think it's likely that others can/will).
My advice is to be much more careful with the timing of attempted upgrades. When running unstable, you shouldn't just blithely upgrade regularly, and when you do upgrade, pay more attention to what is proposed for removal before allowing it to proceed. And always give yourself a little bit of time afterwards to sort stuff out (don't ever attempt upgrades 10 minutes before planning to leave your machine/office/home/whatever).
good luck, ~c