Broken Debian upgrade

Giles Orr gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Sat Oct 24 04:13:27 UTC 2009


I have an old Debian testing-based laptop (550 MHz Pentium) that I
attempted to upgrade.  It usually stays off the network, so the last
time it got a round of updates was back in June, and this time was
about 330 packages.  I ran "aptitude update ; aptitude dist-upgrade".
It installed GRUB2 chainloaded (fine), but the conversion to
dependency-based boot failed (looks fixable).  That's not why I'm
writing, but it might have a bearing on the matter.  The install hung
on this:

   Setting up console-setup (1.45) ...

Everything else installed okay, except for all the
xserver-xorg-video-{radeon|ati|savage|tseng|etc.} which are dependent
on console-setup.

I can think of a couple things that may have affected this: when the
install was asking its questions, there were a whole bunch I answered
without much thought which I now realize were probably related to
this, about what console font I wanted (terminus), did I want utf-8
support (yes), how many pixels tall did I want the font (I chose 14,
not the standard 16), and what combination of fonts did I want (I
think I chose Western Europe/Turkish).  There were other questions I
don't remember.  The other weird thing is I had a package called qingy
installed: it's a getty replacement, but I had it running only on
consoles 3 and 4.  I've now uninstalled it, but that hasn't helped.  I
can't reconfigure the package because it's not installed, and I can't
install it - presumably because it's misconfigured.  The laptop boots
into text mode but won't run X because X isn't configured properly.  I
could uninstall console-setup, but doing so looks likely to pull out
the entirety of X - hardly desirable.  I'll do this if I can't find
another solution though.  Does anybody have suggestions?

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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