Debian Problems - FIXED - partially.

["Ravikant K. Rao" <ravi@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Erm, I have no idea why, but none of my posts are making it across listar the first time ... _again_ , after 48 hours, this is a repost ... [ hope you guys can actually see this - *kicks* exim ]


-- Listar MIME Decryption --------------

  'ey there:
     Okay, I'm running like potato right now - the libpam acting up got
fixed because none of the responses I got on the mailing list helped fix
that particular problem - discovered that rtfm'ing is the only way out.
  Actually, Prabhu said something to the effect of "Go Ahead and enforce the
Loop-Break, but its your responsibility..." and when I tried doing that, I
realised I had to rummage thro' man pages to figure out _how_ to enforce
Loop-Break, and something caught my eye, and when I tried it out - voila!
That was the right away out.

  I su'ed, cd'ed to /var/cache/apt/archives , and did a 

#dpkg --auto-deconfigure -i libpam0g*

  and that kicked out gconv-modules, and the older libpam, installed the new
libpam for me, and then I did another apt-get update, and apt-get upgrade,
apt-get dist-upgrade, and it continued chugging along fine, ... and it
completed all that It needed to.

  Nifty eh?
  Thanks everyone for all your support.I've replied all mails individually,
within this one email so that I don't all of a sudden flood ilugc with 5 or
6 individual emails... 

  Debian for life... At the risk of a flame war, I seriously think _any_
other distro, major or otherwise, could ever come up with something as nifty
as apt.

  Hasta Lavista.

-- -Ravi.
Thu Feb 10 21:34:13 IST 2000

=== 

From: Prabhu Ramachandran <prabhu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed,  9 Feb 2000 01:12:51 +0530 (IST)

  
prabhu>        Wow! what kind of net conenction do you have?
  
  An unlimited access (24x7) , 5 year valid, Rs.20 k Corporate standard dial up
account at ETH - Dishnet services.Its not the con job "Freedom Plan"
thing...  And before you ask me, It sucks during
the day, rocks during the night. And no, I didn't pay the 20 k ;-)

prabhu>        The libpam is the lib that is used for user authentication,
prabhu> pluggable authentication modules.  Since apt has downloaded the newer
   <snip>

  Thanks for all that info - appreciated.

    Ravikant> were okay, and Yes, I could play the same mp3's fine on
    Ravikant> Win98. (It's a laptop)

prabhu>        Even as root?  Its not the speakers.  The error u mentioned
prabhu> usually comes when someone else is using the device.  anyways is ur
prabhu> sound card detected?  Is the user who played mpg123 in the group
prabhu> audio??  tO see if ur card is detected
prabhu>        cat /dev/sndstat
    
 
   Yeah, even as root - And no, my sound card apparently isn't being
detected after slink->potato because me and/or apt screwed up, <shrug>
   cat /dev/sndstat - turns a blind end.

prabhu>        ur-fav-editor ~/.Xclients
prabhu>        put whatever u want there
prabhu>        chmod ug+x ~/.Xclients
 
  <snip - and the followup> 
  Yeah, grok'ed all of 'em - thanks.

    Ravikant>   4] Are there any Power Monitor utils under Linux

prabhu>dpkg --print-avail apmd wmapm genpower
      
prabhu>also compile kernel with apm support and read the laptop howtos.  I

  Thanks a million - there were _just_ what I was searching for. And yeah,
I'm planning to go all out unstable from rocksolid stable - running
semi-woody, potato base ... no slink on my box now. And I will enable apm
when I manually compile the new kernel, 2.3.48 or whatever.
  That brings me to one more question, is there an apt-get way of upgrading
the kernel or should I download the latest tarball and do it manually. Also,
should I get the diff between 2.0.36 - 2.3.latest or should I download
2.3.latest itself and GA? 
  Thanks.


-- -Ravi.

    
=== 

Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 10:43:51 -0800
From: Sudhakar Chandrasekharan <thaths@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

thaths>The before and after potato freeze should not be the problem.

  It wasn't.

thaths>First make sure that your sources.list is current.  Are you doing the
thaths>upgrade through the net (ftp/http)?  In that case here is my sources.list
thaths>for potato:

  Yes, my sources.list was/is current - also modified it to add your
entries. And your question scares me... Is there any _other_ way to upgrade?
I thought the _only_ way was to download using apt,... I'd die if I learnt
that I failed to look at a simple way to do it, and instead blow my phone
bill to a few millions , and spend some 2 weeks or so, and insane amounts of
patience to download right through the night, like 180 MB on a line which
gave me a _maximum_ peak of 3500 B/s at one time...
  And to answer your question, Yes, I _did_ use apt to upgrade via the net,
http primarily, but I _did_ have ftp entries in my sources.list.

thaths>Why don't you try 'apt-get dselect-upgrade'.  Also try using the
thaths>--fix-missing option.

  Yup, tried both - worked for a few minutes, but libpam0g started whining
all over again. Back to square one. :/

thaths>Was sound ever enabled in the kernel?  You can do this by either
thaths>recompiling the kernel with sound support or installing the sound module

  I have no clue as to what could have happened. On the whole, I would
summarise _my_ slink->potato upgrade as fairly smooth except for a few
trivial hurdles...
  1] libpam was a total <masked profanity> - took me awhile to figure out
how to fix it. [ Turned out that another guy had a worse problem, because of
libpam - he lost console && telnet access - had _only_ ssh - some guy even
joked how the upgrade to potato secured his box so well ;-))) 

  2] My sound fails to work anymore , forcing me to do a kernel
upgrade/recompile to enable sound .

  3] The "w" command refuses to recognise xterm's anymore... But it shows as
follows: 
   9:01pm  up  2:07,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU  WHAT
ravi     tty1     -                 6:56pm 22:17   2.25s   ?     -

  Thats like one console, one tty1 - and in the console, 6 eterms open...

  But that's _all_ the problems I've had (so far).

thaths>Why don't you just install the blackbox debian package.

  Didn't know/ever dream/think Debian had wm packages - Debian owns you. ;-)

ravi>   3] Another interesting phenomenon is that if I keep the external PS/2
ravi> mouse connected during boot-up, _only_ the external mouse works after

thaths>Isn't this a BIOS setting?

  It is? <shrug> I have no clue. :/

thaths>I don't know if mpg123 is the same as mp3.  If it is, then use xmms.

  Newp, Don't like xmms too much - I prefer Winamp + DFX { www.fxsound.com }
  So When I wanna listen to my mp3s, I goto windows on this box, connect my
kick butt speakers, and run DFX on top of winamp, and that really kicks
butt bigtime... Somehow, believe it or not, I somehow think I like winamp
better.

thaths> Thaths

  As in Thathachari of soc.culture.tamil? Loved your "Ramblings of
$event"... Always wanted to write to you, but somehow laziness overcame me
;)  And your writings remind me too much of Ramesh... 

  Cheers.

-- -Ravi.

===

From: "K. Arun"  <kar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 09 Feb 2000 17:41:38 +0530

arun> Surely, you meant to do:

arun> $ apt-get update
                ^^^^^^
arun>   Isn't that mandatory every time you try and get new packages ?

   Of course I already did an update _after_ changing every occurence of
"stable" or "slink" in my /etc/apt/sources.list to "unstable" or "potato"
respectively. But now, I would have had to add "frozen", to get potato,
instead of woody, and the fact that I forgot to do it means I ended up with
tons of woody stuff in my box - not that I'm regretting one bit of it.
  And hell yes, _of course_ its mandatory you do it before you do a
dist-upgrade.

arun>   Could be talking through my hat, but not having updated your
arun> packages file could be cause of these problems.

  Newp, That wasn't the problem (apparently).

 Ravikant>   1] I can't play my mp3's anymore.It complains something

arun>   I've seen this problem before, it's a baffling one. On some
arun> occasions, it was trivial matter of killing a runaway 'timidity' or

  Woo, 'leet stuff - lemme check.

 Ravikant>   2] I would like to load AfterStep everytime I go into X
 Ravikant>   - I edited my
 Ravikant> ~/.xinitrc to read "exec afterstep" but it didn't

arun>        Could we have the error message from your
arun> $HOME/.xsession-errors file please ?

  Here you go:

pronto:/home/ravi/up# cat /home/ravi/.xsession-errors
FvwmTaskBar.MailCheckModule.LoadMailCheckModule(): error loading
mini-newmail.xpm
  (FvwmTaskBarMailCheckModuleIcon.MAIL)
Detected colordepth : 8
/bin/sh: wmavgload: command not found
Pager: can't get font 5x8
Trying... 5x8,-*--14-*
pronto:/home/ravi/up# 

  <and prabhu - _please_ don't mail me asking to not work as root ;P>

 Ravikant>   7] Specifically to Binand -> Can you post your
 Ravikant>   muttconfig files -

arun>  We've heard a fair bit about these files, could I have a
arun> look-see too ? :)

  Binand - Wakey Wakey, rise and shine... ;-)

  Thanks so much for your help.

-- -Ravi.

==
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 18:20:52 +0530
From: "G . Gautam" <gautamg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

gautam>To customize your X startup, the file /etc/X11/config' must contain
gautam>the line ^Allow-user-xsession'.

<snip - other foo + replies/updates from prabhu/you>

  Thanks for your help all the same - I'll play around with it.

-- -Ravi.
==

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