I apt-get updated and upgraded yesterday. Firstly udev had a small spaz and told me I needed to touch a file and then apt-get install a bunch of stuff that I just knew looked wrong. Then it told me I needed to reboot. I just knew I was going to regret that move. And yep, it was wrong and yep I regret it.

For a start it loaded an SMP kernel which is just plain stupid. At least I have a work around for that.

Then X failed to start with all sorts of complaints about mouses and kbds and evdev (what ever the hell that is). "No core keyboard" is an error message. Yeah right. I picked up the keyboard and shook it at the Debian Gods, but it did nothing. Looks to me like lots of people are having problems with Xorg right now, but no one seems to have an answer. One solution posted was to install a bunch of new Xorg modules. Part of that process actually removed all of Gnome for me. Without asking first. Bloody hell.

I just know I'm going to spend all week fighting this just to get back to where I was Sunday arvo.

Yes I'm using Debian Etch which is clearly marked unstable, but bloody hell, a working X is not a lot to ask for. Especially with how close Etch is to going stable anyway.

The Photo

Yesterday Rik and I spent the afternoon touring Rodney District looking for things to photograph. We found a couple of places where stolen cars are regularly dumped. At one spot there was a car that was rusting happily with only the Shell sticker on the inside of the fuel filler flap still looking good. I admire it's tenacity! I have no idea how the sticker can stay there given the flap is almost completely rusted out.

UPDATE: OK, so I figured out that I needed to run apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-evdev and xserver-xorg-input-kbd and that finally gave me X running again. Then a frenzy of apt-getage got Gnome running again. But bugger me if something in that process didn't reconfigure /etc/network/interfaces to tell it to be DHCP instead of having a static IP. WTF? Bloody hell, that took 2 hours to figure out. Mostly because the symptoms were mysql refused to start so I spent ages trying to find that problem. So 30 hours of swearing and cursing and I'm back to where I started.

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Posted: Monday, 12 June, 2006 17:40

Captured: 2006:06:11 14:13:32

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