-----Original Message----- From: Richard Bos [mailto:allabos@freeler.nl] Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 3:07 PM To: SuSE Linux Subject: Re: [SLE] HELP! Uninstalled CUPS and can't boot into KDE [...] As said in my other reply on this subject. Synaptic/apt is telling you what it is going to do and ask you for a confirmation. Synaptic tells you that it is going to remove X packages and you are provided an option to show details. This is showing what packages are to be removed. Was this confirmation not shown to you?
Oh, probably... among hundreds, since this was the first time running it for more than a small test. But, I was accustomed to YaST(x) telling me about dozens of files that would be uninstalled, re-installed, etc. I just figure it knows what it's doing, and if I don't have any special requests, it will just hack and splice until it gets me back to where I was... only with newer versions of everything application that is reflected on the mirror, and all of them nicely sorted/fixed for dependencies.
In case of a upgrade apt will only update the packages that it can without removing a package or installing a new one. In case a pkg is to be removed or to be added the package causing this will be hold back and once more you need to confirm the removal of the packages or the installation of new ones.
I don't recall having to explicitly accept a list of such removals, one at a time, so it probably was not being done in my case.
In case of a dist-upgrade apt proposes to remove packages and install new ones. Perhaps this is what has happened, but then still it will not go as far to leave your system in a bad state.
That sounds familiar. But, this is not a fair test, because I'm the guy who forgot to disable the locking screensaver, so when I returned to my system after going for supper, I found myself locked out with my password not being accepted. So, I had no way to know what stage Synaptic had reached. I was unable to get the offending processes killed from console, without killing X entirely. Thereafter, when I restarted X, the WM-only problem had set in, and much of X stuff was not runable, including KDE and GNOME. I tried re-booting, but saw no change. So, among other things, this meant that I couldn't run Synaptic again, to see if it could find itself. Then, I got busy with other stuff, and now my SuSE 8.1 is here, so I'll try to get enough going to get /home and /etc onto a CD-R and then I'll just do a fresh 8.1 install. Anyway, I wouldn't have mentioned it again, except that Tom was reporting symptoms very much like what I encountered. Maybe, in my case, Synaptic had gotten partway through the process and was prompting me for the next step, but never received the response because (by then) I was locked out. Is there a log file that I should examine, to see what progress Synaptic/apt had made? /kevin