Broken Debian upgrade

[Giles Orr]

2009/10/24 Giles Orr <gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>:
> 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?

Apologies for replying to myself, but in case anyone is curious:

This is a known Debian bug:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=536683 .  I can't
find the page with the fix I used at the moment, but essentially I
made sure I had no /etc/default/console-setup(?) file, and that
/etc/X11/xorg.conf included only "default" values, and the install
went fine.  I use the Dvorak keyboard layout, which triggered the bug.

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