I am building a new system. This time around, it seems *almost* (tm) to have worked---but I have to send in the motherboard. Meanwhile perhaps I can prepare the existing system for the eventuality.
I have been running this system as partially crippled for several months; because of the small disk space, etc., I cannot afford to do anything potentially risky on this machine AT LEAST until I get it talking to the new machine and back it all up. Not the biggest problem w/ the existing system is that I deleted the /var/lib/dpkg/info/status, etc. files. Since then I have done a few lightweight upgrades. CAN I INSTALL OVER THIS SYSTEM SAFELY USING THE 1.3 or pre-1.3 disks? THE BIGGEST PROBLEM is that compiling has been hosed for months, and I consequently gave up months ago on packages I have been compiling regularly for a couple years. Part of the problem seems to be I copied the include files from a linux kernel over a system that had incompatible, older (3.0.x) libraries---I gave up on the whole adventure months ago, waiting until I have a clean install on a system that can take it (ie., more than 200MB disk space). I have posted to this list many times about this confusing problem about kernel headers. I have read many postings, and tried to make sense of it all. But in my mind, it has so far been a confusing and vexing problem. I even installed more recent libc5 development versions, but the compiling problem wouldn't go away. WILL UPGRADING TO 1.3 debian make any difference? I should say that even though I have been using debian linux EXCLUSIVELY since before the great a.out to ELF debacle, I may be forced to abandon ship for another distribution on my new system unless I can make sense of the header issue, as well as debianized sources. You might just say that I am clueless. It's one more level of kludges I don't need to deal with. Thanks for the many times I have received helpful advice on this list. Alan Davis -- Alan Eugene Davis Marianas High School 15o 8.8'N GMT+10 [EMAIL PROTECTED] AAA 196 Box 10,001 145o 42.5'E Voice: (670) 235-6580 Saipan, MP 96950 Northern Mariana Islands ---===+++#+++===--- "if a close inspection should show that the supposed hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a clever imitation of hand-wrought goods, but an imitation so cleverly wrought as to give the same impression of line and surface to any but a minute examination by a trained eye, the utility of the article, including gratification which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty, would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety percent, or even more" ------Thorsten Veblen, _The Theory of the Leisure Class_ -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .