RE: Strange things going on in Sid

["Mark Allums" <mark@allums.com>]

> > This is why people should wait six months before switching to jessie,
> > and why sid is only for the experienced, the hard core, and those who
> > don't mind serious breakage leading to reinstalls.  I was bitten by
> > the bad kernel, and as a side effect, it rendered X unusable as
> > well.  No matter what kernel I chose to boot, and I had several to
> > choose from, X was toast.  It was not a configuration issue, or a
> > mismatched kernel module.  I never tried seriously to solve it, I
> > used it as an excuse to build a new machine.  I have my data, and
> > that's all I care about.  (Wheezy runs quite well on fairly recent
> > hardware, and installing on a non-locked UEFI system works well
> > enough.)
> 
> My last kernel booted OK, and I pulled the offending 3.8. It was not
> offered again next time, and I'm not sure why it was offered the first
> time, as a change of kernel series is normally a manual matter. As far
> as I can see, I have no metapackage which would prefer 3.8 over 3.2.
> 
> Waiting a while solves most sid problems, as long as it still boots. I
> have twice had to reinstall when it got broken beyond my abilities to
> fix, once with a nasty perl dependency loop and once because of the
> wretched grub. I do keep an up-to-date backup of /etc, and a saved
> --get-selections, and I don't keep any important data on the machine. I
> don't clean the cache too often, either.



I have decided that the X issue must have been partially a disk corruption problem.  I am using an overcomplicated file system scheme, and I am always asking for trouble with that.  My LVM volumes went out of sync as well, so I am hoping it was just bad luck, and not a serious problem.   I will be checking the disks for S. M. A. R. T. errors and bad blocks later. 

Mark