this was funny (me being dumb)
every once in a while i do something dumb. i
do run debian testing and bits of unstable (as
few as i can possibly get by with at present
it is the kernel and firefox i use the most recent
versions that land).
the case in point the other day was when i was
trying to see if missing i386 includes could be
fixed by randomly installing some i386 packages.
i wasn't paying attention to the entire list of
packages (not scrolling through the entire series
of screens) and didn't notice that one package i
installed removed pretty much my entire MATE
desktop environment along with all sorts of other
things important things.
it wasn't until i came back a few minutes later
and looked at the screen and said, "This isn't right!"
to recover i went to /var/log/apt and copied the
most recent term.log file to my root home directory
and then edited it to remove some of the extra things
i didn't need. and turned the Removes into apt-get
installs, etc.
after that i restarted the system to make sure it
would boot and looked about right.
the only things that i needed to figure out after
that was that i had man pages that would not display
correctly for a user vs. the root version which worked
as it should and slrn also did not show the groups
correctly (they both ran, but parts of the page were
not rendered (the CAPS, and any options didn't show
things like -v were gone from the text on the screen).
so as usual i tried to find what parts made up
those and reinstalled them. no luck. i also booted
back into my stable partition and ran a list of all
my installed packages so i could compare that list to
what i had in the testing system.
eventually i came up with the idea that the
build-deps for slrn might contain some magical
part that wasn't actually listed as a dependency
for slrn itself. bingo!
so all is right again (as far as i can tell :) ).
note, this is how i learn and this isn't a
production system that affects anyone else. i
consider it my duty to have a bit of fun once in a
while and try something out, but i don't recommend
this for just anyone.
as a side note, the issue i was trying to fix was
my own error in having -m32 in CFLAGS in the shell
environment when trying to build a python package
that had some C extensions and that flag made the
build process go out and look for i386 includes. so
all of this was kicked off by me not remembering i
had that flag set.
i don't normally do much i386 type building so all
of the things i added and the extra repositories that
i put in exploring multi-arch probably can be removed
now, but they don't seem to be taking up that much
extra space. hmm... for the moment i'm leaving
things alone. :)
songbird
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