Re: [tlug] Well now I'm hosed - Dapper/Edgy died

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 03:07:37PM +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
> TLUG,
> 
> 
> Bottom line is that I can basically only get on my computer via command prompt.
> I tried running the system upgrade commands again, but they complained of the
> same broken dependancies.
> 

What sort of video card do you have? 
This is the sort of thing that really gives advocacy a bad name--Edgy
used a very buggy version of xorg, that doesn't work right with Matrox,
ATI and probably others.  They are aware of it, but the last post that
seemed official, that I saw on their bug tracker was that the developers
were concentrating on getting up to xorg-7.2.  

The only solution, if you have, for example, a matrox card, is on their
bug tracker.  (Go to bugs.ubuntu.com and do a search for mga, I think
it's the first or second one listed.)  One would have to install (or
upgraded) in terminal, add something to apt/sources.list and put in the
fixed version--fixed by Debian, apparently, not Ubuntu.

I would suggest, if you have one of those two cards (or even some
others) trying their bug list, searching under your card and seeing if
there's a fix.  

The less newcomer friendly distros, such as Arch and Gentoo, have
already fixed it.  FreeBSD has many people testing their version of
xorg-7.x and that one works with Matrox too.  :)  

Of course, if you were going to pop a CD in your Windows using
 friend's machine and say, "Look how great this is," when
it booted and you got the monitor out of range message, it would make
him think he should probably stay with MS. 

> Can I repair these broken dependancies and get my system back? I really, really
> don't want to have to do a fresh install, and all the moving of files and
> configuring of settings and resizing of partitions and the inevitable one thing
> you forgot to backup or copy that you don't realize isn't there anymore until
> weeks later.
> 
> Help. Please.


Again, I would check their bug tracker--I would say there's at least a
60 percent chance that this was one of their video issues.  If it was
a Matrox card, I know there's a fix as long as you can get in there with
a command line. 



-- 

Scott Robbins

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