Weblog entry #135 for simonw
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#135
SID ate my GNOME
Posted by simonw on Sun 21 Jan 2007 at 13:57
This morning the screen lock on my SID box wouldn't unlock.
After killing the relevant process, closing down some applications, I figured time to restart X as there had been various patches. Noticed on route to the restart that I had rather a lot of free disk space in "/".
Restarting gdm gave me the expected login screen, but on logging in I got nothing but an empty blue screen.
Quick inspection of /var/log/dpkg.log showed that the nightly update had removed most of the GNOME desktop, and then refused to install the new stuff in SID, because of issues surrounding the availability of libbonobo2-0.
A quick reseting of setting to Debian Snapshot servers (see earlier blog entry linked below), set the date in sources.list back 4 days from today. "grep"ed the relevant "remove" lines from dpkg.log into an apt-get command, and 80MB of download and I'm back.
http://www.debian-administration.org/users/simonw/weblog/49
Both clever, and pointless, I really ought to have switched to tracking Etch, once it became clear we were nearing release. I'm sure the few bug reports on Etch I've made from work will prove far more useful than me wandering around in Sid trying to keep it working here.
After killing the relevant process, closing down some applications, I figured time to restart X as there had been various patches. Noticed on route to the restart that I had rather a lot of free disk space in "/".
Restarting gdm gave me the expected login screen, but on logging in I got nothing but an empty blue screen.
Quick inspection of /var/log/dpkg.log showed that the nightly update had removed most of the GNOME desktop, and then refused to install the new stuff in SID, because of issues surrounding the availability of libbonobo2-0.
A quick reseting of setting to Debian Snapshot servers (see earlier blog entry linked below), set the date in sources.list back 4 days from today. "grep"ed the relevant "remove" lines from dpkg.log into an apt-get command, and 80MB of download and I'm back.
http://www.debian-administration.org/users/simonw/weblog/49
Both clever, and pointless, I really ought to have switched to tracking Etch, once it became clear we were nearing release. I'm sure the few bug reports on Etch I've made from work will prove far more useful than me wandering around in Sid trying to keep it working here.
Comments on this Entry
Posted by Anonymous (158.36.xx.xx) on Mon 22 Jan 2007 at 08:43
probably a good idea to NOT run dist-upgrade without interaction, if you run upgrade it will just upgrade packages - not remove them, like with dist-upgrade.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Posted by Anonymous (195.200.xx.xx) on Mon 22 Jan 2007 at 10:12
This happen several time a year.
running a dist-upgrade on sid w/o interaction is a really bid idea (running it a morning when half awake is a bad idea too, that's how I removed gnome a few month ago).
running a dist-upgrade on sid w/o interaction is a really bid idea (running it a morning when half awake is a bad idea too, that's how I removed gnome a few month ago).
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
If you want to track Sid, running dist-upgrade manually eats your life away far too quickly. I think better to suffer the odd "catastrophe" than to babysit every update, although I might feel differently if I didn't have 8Mbps broadband?!
If it went wrong more often I'd have the recovery down to a finer art. As it was I spent most of the time trying to find my blog post where I documented how I used the Snapshot servers to fix my issues with the Xorg upgrade. Once found the actual fix took only a few minutes, which is way less than the time I would be spending running dist-upgrade manually on a routine basis.
I thought the first guy I saw tracking Sid automatically was mad as well, but he convinced me in the end.
If it went wrong more often I'd have the recovery down to a finer art. As it was I spent most of the time trying to find my blog post where I documented how I used the Snapshot servers to fix my issues with the Xorg upgrade. Once found the actual fix took only a few minutes, which is way less than the time I would be spending running dist-upgrade manually on a routine basis.
I thought the first guy I saw tracking Sid automatically was mad as well, but he convinced me in the end.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Posted by Anonymous (200.152.xx.xx) on Mon 22 Jan 2007 at 13:44
I would recommend using 'apt-get upgrade' automatically (or, as I do, use update-notifier/update-manager daily) and run a full upgrade using aptitude once a week, or so. Much saner life, with no unwanted happenings once in a while. Haven't seen my system break like that for years now, even when upgrading automatically with 'upgrade' =).
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]