Bug#408034: 3 upgrade problems to xorg 7
Package: xserver-xorg
Version: 1:7.1.0-10
I upgraded my xwindows system from stable to testing and ran into three
problems which took awhile to solve.
First, simply clicking on "+" in aptitude over package "xorg" produced
broken packages. i had to manually look through the broken packages, select
"+" for the upgradable ones, and go through the others one by one, find the
conflicting package that was breaking them, and telling it to upgrade. After
multiple iterations of this I ask aptitude to fix the rest and it finally
could. i suppose this is a wishlist item for aptitude but i'm including it
in this bug report in case another poor user finds it in a search.
Second, package installation failed. xbase-utils kept wanting to overwrite
man pages belonging to other programs which were presumably packaged
separately in previous releases (like "oclock"), and so xbase-utils failed
to install (configure?). This preventing everything else from installing.
The irony is that these other packages, like oclock, were due to be removed
anyways, but for some reason aptitude wanted to install xbase-utils before
it removed anything. I spent 10 or 20 minutes running aptitude, trying to
install, manually removing the next blocking package.
It would be nice if dpkg would report all of such blocking packages at once,
which would have let me uninstall all of them at once.
Also, the current version of xbase-utils should be marked as conflicting
with older versions of oclock, etc.
After removing a bunch of these one by one, I got tired of it and ran dpkg
--force-overwrite -i xbase-utils____. This completed the installation (but
made me feel dirty).
However, X wouldn't run, giving me "Fatal server error: could not open
default font 'fixed'". After half an hour on the internet, I found that the
problem was explained here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=362940;msg=10
For some reason, none of the packages that I had upgraded had offered to
replace my xorg.conf with a clean version, making it hard for me to discover
this problem.
I edited xorg.conf and updated the font paths and then it worked. Somewhere
along the way I had also manually upgraded xfonts-base, btw, I don't know if
that was necessary.
I suggest, as was suggested in that message, that some config script offers
to modify xorg.conf (without replacing it) and provide the appropriate new
FontPath entries.
Sorry if this bug report is a dupe, I searched BTS search for "xbase-utils
upgrade overwrite" and found 0 hits.
thanks,
bayle
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