On Thu, Mar 04, 1999 at 10:42:23PM -0500, Tommy wrote: > Stephen Pitts wrote: > > > > > > You don't. Downgrading packages has undefined results. A better option > > would be to > > tell the list about your problems and we'll help you fix them > > -- > > Currently dselect marks 90% of the package on my system as broken. And > there are a lot of them. I tried switching to exim from smail, just to > try it. I have constant error messages. Several aps/ games like quake > no longer run when not in X and I can not seem to find the requested > libraries or get them installed. Fetchmail does not work Most things > on the box seem to work fine, but the whole thing seems a little whacked > > In the hope that my errors will not be repeated by other I will endure > the embarrassment of explaining how this happened. My system was running > fine off the packages is on my Debian 2.0 cdrom. I decided to upgrade > some of the packages via ftp. When I upgraded the package lists of > stable, unstable, contrib, and non-free dselect presumed that I wanted > to upgrade everything on my system. That everything I had previously > installed that had a newer package available was selected for install > and included in the download list. > > This created a serious problem for me because I need the packaging > system to warn me about dependencies. If I cancel the download and try > to install individual packages via dpkg the required packages will > already be marked as selected and no dependency warnings will be given. > > I tried getting part of the list of aps I wanted to upgrade, but got a > ton of error messages for the reasons just cited. Not knowing what else > to do I decided to get everything that had been selected. I must say > I'm kind of ashamed of this since I really do know better than to hog an > ftp site like that, but I really did not know what else to do. > > Needless to say lots of errors occur when you try to ftp hundreds of mgs > of files. Now dselect say 90% of my packages are broken. Far to many to > fix one at a time using dpkg. I feel as if I have lost control of my > system. I would like to get control back. Any help is greatly > appreciated. Thank You > > > -- > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null > First off, don't be embarrassed. While trying to nuke a RedHat parition two months ago, I also nuked 700 MB of DATA on a Win98 partition that was mounted. We all screw up sometimes.
Here's my advice: Download and install APT, manually if needed, from ftp.debian.org . On my system, it only requires libc6 and libstdc++2.9. I'm pretty sure you've got those. Once that is done, setup your /etc/apt/sources.list. Mine (using ftp.debian.org, the GA TECH mirror) is: deb ftp://ftp.debian.org unstable main contrib non-free Once you've done that, run apt-get -m -f install. That tells APT to grab whatever is needed to fix your system. Don't worry about consuming network bandwidth. You'll only have to do this once. At most, it should take 4 hours on a 28.8 modem. -- Stephen Pitts [EMAIL PROTECTED] webmaster - http://www.mschess.org
