Re: Debian put into a broken state

From: Sean O'Dell (sean_at_celsoft.com)
Date: 04/01/04

  • Next message: Steve Lamb: "Re: Odd machine behavior - kernel processes dying, no entropy" 
    To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 12:11:47 -0800

    On Thursday 01 April 2004 12:00 pm, Alan Chandler wrote:
    > On Thursday 01 April 2004 20:39, Sean O'Dell wrote:
    > > I'm new to Debian, and this morning I put a half-way finished
    > > installation into a broken state and I can't figure out how to get it
    > > back on track.
    > >
    > > Basically, I was trying to get a KDE machine working, and this morning I
    > > added non-free and contrib to my sources.list file so I could install the
    > > nvidia driver. I had the machine working primitively with
    > > networking+dhcpcd working, but KDE wasn't running yet because I needed to
    > > install the nvidia driver. I had both testing and unstable sources in
    > > sources.list in order to get KDE 3.2 installed. After adding non-free
    > > and contrib to my sources this morning, I ran apt-get update,
    > > dist-upgrade and upgrade, then apt-get install nvidia-glx. I rebooted
    > > the system after that
    >
    > Its been a while since I worked with the nvidia drivers, but don't you have
    > to build them from source once you've downloaded the debian package?

    I honestly don't know...I never got far enough to see what the nvidia-glx
    package I installed would do. After I installed it, I rebooted to see what
    state everything would be in and it ended up in a broken state.

    > > to see how it would all go, and at that point, things were pretty funky.
    > >
    > > eth0 isn't up, I can't get dhcpcd to start, and now I can't even get kdm
    > > to
    >
    > What happened when the should have started - was there any error on the
    > console?

    Basically, it booted up pretty quietly. I got a console, but ifconfig
    reported only lo being initialized. eth0 was never brought up.

    > > report anything in /var/log/kdm.log nor XFree86 to report anything in
    > > /var/log/XFree86.0.log...they apparently both die before they can even
    > > log anything.
    >
    > XFree86.0.log is the day old log. Is there no new log. Did X even try to
    > start?

    It doesn't look like it to me. When I run /etc/init.d/kdm start, I get
    nothing printing to the console, no new XFree86.0.log and no kde.log files.
    It just dies quickly and quietly.

    > > What should I do to get things straightened back out? What did I do to
    > > get things into this state?
    > >
    > > Just in case, I've included my /etc/apt/sources.list file. Is there
    > > anything else I should provide for reference?
    >
    > Need much clearer description of exactly what happened during start up.
    > Are you left with a login prompt on the text console?

    It just boots up very quietly and quickly. The only error I get is Alsa is
    unhappy with something (I think a module isn't installed that it wants), but
    everything else goes okay. I get no errors reported about eth0 not coming
    up, and no errors in /var/log/messages. XFree86.0.log and kdm.log don't even
    exist anymore...everything related to XFree86 and KDE dies before any log
    files can be generated. dhcpcd is still installed...it just doesn't
    initialize eth0.

    I wish I knew what else to report. After the dist-upgrade, upgrade and
    installing nvidia-glx, it just went into this funky state and I can't figure
    out how to roll it back to where the network would at least initialize.

            Sean O'Dell 

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