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

[Dave M G <martin@example.com>]

Sig,

Thanks for replying.
> > big hammer:
> > dpkg --purge --force-all 

This got me through the darkness. Using the purge and force-all 
commands, I was able to stomp out those cyclic dependencies in 
OpenOffice. Then I went back to use:
gksu "update-manager -c"

It didn't go fully smoothly, so a few more rounds of:
sudo apt-get -f install

... were called for. Not too bad though. This time round it seemed to 
actually fix stuff. It also reported about six applications that were 
being "held back", one of which was mplayer and the rest were python 
related. They weren't stopping me, but I figured I'd kill 'em anyway.

Then finally the update manager decided it was happy enough to start 
downloading again, so I went for a much needed coffee at the local 
Starbucks. Came back to a warning message asking if I wanted to keep my 
current "my.cnf" configuration file for MySQL. Yes, I do, since that 
kind of thing is basically the whole point behind not doing a fresh install.

After a successful install and reboot, I then enabled all the restricted 
and universe repositories, marked all upgrades, and installed away. 
Again, a couple of holdouts, notably firestarter and one impossible to 
remember lib package.

When all was installed, broken packages fixed, I rebooted, and noticed 
that my display was acting a little wonky. Text would sort of come and 
go depending on where I moved the mouse. I assumed the culprit was my 
Nvidia drivers. I attempted to remove the manual installation and go 
with the repository version, but that was a no go.

I've been down this road before, though, so getting the latest drivers 
directly from Nvidia and doing the necessary steps to ensure that it 
installs (always has trouble finding the right version of gcc), wasn't 
too stressful for me.

Reboot, and I'm now officially un-hosed. System is looking good, all my 
settings in place, the desired new programs are up and running. 
Everybody is looking happy. Did a few checks for broken packages and 
re-installs on key things just to be sure, but no errors to report.

I probably just jinxed myself by saying that.

Anyway, thank you to everyone for offering support and advice through 
another valley of the shadows in Linux world. And thanks to the list 
just for being there for when this type of stuff happens.


ï--
Dave M G
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
Kernel 2.6.17.7
Pentium D Dual Core Processor
PHP 5, MySQL 5, Apache 2