Greetings-- I just made an attempt at upgrading my installed libc6 using libc6_2.0.7.19981211-6.deb. I have a 2.0 complete install, but I was going to try GnuCash, which requires guile 1.3, which requires a few things that are newer than Deb2.0.
Anyway, it didn't go so well, apparently, since some of the other libs that guile depends on didn't install due to errors, along the lines of "unable to link" or somesuch (I am embarrassed to say I did not write the message down, as I was rather frantic in short order). Having updated libc6, I didn't know whether a reboot was in order, since that is a fairly important library for just about everything. Well, this was a bad idea, since my machine hung rebooting, and then nothing would run once the kernel finished starting. Couldn't log in, rescue disk doesn't have dpkg, and I was sorta stuck, and sort of frantic (moreso, in fact). So I just reinstalled and reconfigured the base package using the debian installer, which turned out to be sort of okay... it had the desired effect of replacing libc6 with an older version, and it left almost everything else intact. (Actually, smail won't run anymore... it just bails on startup, despite the fact that the config files seem to be there... any thoughts?) The question, then, is what to do NEXT TIME I do something dumb like this... how can I avoid getting stuck in this situation, given that I have a 2.0 CD... Any suggestions appreciated, regarding the best way to backtrack when libc6 upgrades go bad, or how to get smail to run again. Thanks Dan Hugo