Hi all, I followed the advice from [EMAIL PROTECTED] and did the following:
Made /etc/apt/sources.list look like this: deb http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main contrib non-free deb http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free Then "apt-get update" led to multiple problems regardless of whether the first line in /etc/apt/sources.list was commented out or not. In the end, the trouble was caused by something a friend warned me about. The dpkg (or apt if there is a difference) database couldn't handle the number of package entries. Easy to fix but hard to find the answer. I could not find one mention on the debian.org site about it so in the end google told me to add this to /etc/apt/apt.conf: APT::Cache-Limit 10000000; I was on my way after that. I updated apt first, which didn't work until after I had added the above line to /etc/apt/apt.conf. I couldn't get a new version of apt until apt could read the list of updates! Catch-22. "apt-get dist-upgrade" saw a meagre 450MBs downloaded from the internet. There were multiple problems and learning from these experiences I would not recommend updating the distro while in gnome. Also, when the upgrade process broke I would have to kick it off again with either "apt-get -f install" or "dpkg --configure -a" or "apt-get dist-upgrade". After answering many confusing questions about packages I probably don't need I had an almost complete system. I saw multiple errors pertaining to gnome trying to be started but failing on the absence of libgnome2-perl. So before I cranked up gnome (by this stage I had crashed gnome and was in run level 3) I ran "apt-get install libgnome2-perl", about 3 packages with consisting of 5MB came down and installed. I restarted (in the best traditions of Windoze) and everything was fine. I am amazed. Boy, I can't believe how horrible the old gnome (2.2) is compared to the new one (2.4). This was well worth it. I notice that it's a little more sluggish than the previous, so in my next email I'm calling for suggestions to speed it up. Oh, I see that I'm now using nautilus! Thanks, Michael. --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message generated in webmail.
