I posted a couple of days ago about some X problems I had on dist-upgrade to unstable. With help from the list I had fixed it and the laptop ran like a champ.
Now for dist-upgrade the sequel! The laptop is a Gateway Solo 9150, PentiumII, 400MHz, 384 MB, ATI RageProLT. THe only reason I am hanging on to this puppy is that it has screwless user swappable primary HD. I can swap the HD in 10 seconds flat! So I have serveral HDs with different OSes on them...including some from Redmond. Comes in handly in my consulting biz. I had dist-upgraded a 6GB HD as a test and decided to dist-upgrade my workhorse 20GB HD afterward as a precaution...But Mr. Murphy has stepped right in and clobbered me. The dist-upgrade on the 20GB HD went exactly like on the 6GB and predictably X did not work and I proceeded to correct the problem the same way which was to add mousedev and psmouse modules and edit my XF86Config file to set the path to /dev/input/mice. X still did not work and digging in a bit deeper I found that there was no executabe at /etc/X11/X symlink-> Xfree86. I further found that this executable (on my 6GB HD) comes from the package xserver-xfree86. For some reason that file is not installed and even after removing and installing the package. I got into aptitude and found a sea of red with unresolved dependencies...particularly in X. I tried apt-get -f install which died with a kernel panic while trying to install Atalk. I got Kernel panic: Fatal exception in interrupt In interrupt handler - not syncing If I reboot and run aptitude it tells me to dpkg --configure -a since it was interrupted and when I do I get the same kernel panic with atalk. Is it worth fixing this problem? OR start from scratch. How do I do a netinstall with unstable. I don't see an iso image for that. It took about an hour for a netinstall download of about 1,170 or so packages. Could my dependency problems the second time around have been caused by a changing repository in the middle of my download? I have too many questons on this issue but I better stop here. I would very much appreciate getting educated on this issue...Thank you, -bakki PS: THe main reason for my upgrade was to get Ruby 1.8.4 as I do a lot of Ruby on Rails development.
