No,  I never used --force-blah.  The trouble was that I had xdm going,
and my video card cannot start X more than once (unless there is a reboot
in between) - my card is a Diamond Stealth 3000 3D.  Also, I had followed
the upgrade mini-HOWTO, but had not upgraded libgdbm and perl (since
this was only 'suggested' by the HOWTO - as opposed to being said to
be necessary).  Because of this, a lot of packages were having many
troubles configuring themselves (I know that this occurs anyway, but
it seemed much worse this time).  Then, the install stopped and started
xdm and my machine hung.  I have to press 'reset' at this time (there
is no other way to bring it back).  When the machine rebooted, it was in
an unusable state.  I suppose I could have brought it back (I tried
several suggestions offered on the lists, but that just got me to another
problem, and another, and another).  After this, I gave up and retinstalled.
This was not too bad, because my installation was quite old and was not
entirely 'clean' (beacuse I had learned to use Debian on this machine).
Its just too bad - I had had it going since buzz...

I think that, if I had waited a week (and kept up with debian-user),
I would have had no troubles.  I am just wondering about those people
out there who are not reading the mailing list...

Paul

On 16-Jan-98 Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 16, 1998 at 03:15:14PM -0700, Paul Rightley wrote:
>> Yes, I understand very well NOW that there are no hamm disks yet.
>> My point was that this upgrade of Debian is really expecting a lot
>> of "typical Debian users."  At first glance, I thought that
>> disks under dists/unstable/main/disks-i386 would actually belong
>> to the unstable distribution.  It is such slight perception that can
>> really make things difficult for most users.  For instance, Scott
>> Ellis' Mini-HOWTO is very good - I followed all of the portions
>> of it that called out specific packages and that didn't seem like
>> "suggestions" (as opposed to "necessary steps").  In this case,
>> I did not upgrade libgdm1 and perl and due to another (slight)
>> circumstance, was left with an unusable system after I launched
>> dselect.
> 
> Did you ever use --force-blah with dpkg? Was it ever possible to hose
> your system without using --force-blah?
> 
> I upgraded my system before Scott's HOWTO was written; at that stage
> it was fairly simple and all the dependencies seemed to prevent
> me from doing anything wrong. IIRC, it was basically a case of
> installing new ld.so, removing the libc5 -dev libraries, installing
> libc6, installing the hamm non-g libraries, then installing the hamm g 
> libraries, then anything else, like bash. For a while I only upgraded
> the libraries (just to support running new libc6 stuff from hamm),
> not bothering with existing packages. Never any sign of trouble.
> 
> 
> Hamish
> -- 
> Hamish Moffatt, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Latest Debian packages at ftp://ftp.rising.com.au/pub/hamish. PGP#EFA6B9D5
> CCs of replies from mailing lists are welcome.   http://hamish.home.ml.org
> 
> 
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----------------------------------
Paul Rightley                     DX-3 Hydrodynamics, MS P940
Los Alamos National Laboratory    Los Alamos, NM 87545
Phone: (505)667-0460              Fax: (505)665-3359
----------------------------------


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