Broken Woody

[Jack Dodds]

Help!  I had a working install of Woody on my P4.

Then (probably showing my ignorance) I tried to install a recent version 
of Abiword by adding a line specifying /unstable/main to my 
/etc/apt/sources.list, and (from a characer mode screen) doing an

apt-get install abiword.

This resulted in the upgrading of many packges, and a pile of cryptic 
errors.  In an attempt to fix these I did an

apt-get -f install

which produced many illegal instruction messages. I did what I thought 
was a clean shutdown.  The next time I rebooted, hda3 (my root 
filesystem) failed its boot-time check and was fixed up.

Giving up, I restored /etc/apt/sources.list to its original contents 
(which specifies only stable versions). Then I did an

apt-get upgrade

This got me back more or less to where I started, I think, but now when 
the system boots, xdm will not run.

Also, the "sleep" command produces an "illegal instruction" message.  It 
is used in various scripts, and so on boot up, tty1 is flooded with 
these illegal instructions messages so that I can't log in there.  I can 
do an Alt <F2>, log in, and everything looks normal except that xdm 
won't run.

Now, I could just go back and reload Woody from scratch (if I were 
having trouble with Windows, that's what the tech support would 
undoubtedly recommend!)  Is there a better way?

Also, was it wrong to add the unstable/main line to sources.list?  The 
man page for apt-get seems to show that you can request a package from a 
different release (e.g. unstable) - is this just a theoretical 
possibility or does it really work?

Thanks for any comments!

Jack Dodds



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