Emergency: KUbuntu Died

D.P.

D.P.

D.P.

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
32,743
I have KUbunutu (edgy release) installed happily for half a year or so. last night when installing some stuff adept was being strange and crtashed, followed by KDE acting weird. I tried to reboot and now nothing works. During boot the screen indicates that some stuff loads, but then it freezes.

I can boot into the recovery mode command prompt, from there I backupped some work but its not efficient scp'ing files to our lab server.


I tried to do some apt-get clean/install/upgrade to see if adept crashing had screwed anhyting up. This just made things worse and the boot screen indiactes it makes even less progress.


I can't do anywork at the moment and I have some very tight deadlines. If i can't sort this soon I will have to cancal some holdiay plans.:(

Any tips?
 
I'd say your first step is to stick in the live-cd, boot off that, mount your internal disk and rescue your stuff. Just backup your /home/username folder, that should have your desktop settings and files preserved. If you you need to backup /etc/ configs as well, I'd do that.

Once you know you can trash it, just do a reinstall, restore your configs and home folder, and it'll be as it was :)
 
Seems that while installing some packages a dependency was qt4 and adept in its infinite widom decided that taht means KDE has to be upgraded to v4 without warning, and thus is started removing KDE 3.7 while I was using it. Rebooting half-way though left me with a dead OS. KD4 and KDE 3.7 refused to install properly so I'm utilising the rather old KDE 3.5


Crazy OS! I may have the option to get a brand new MC Book Pro 17" from the lab as an upgrade form my thinkpad. The upgrade wont be that big though (similar CPU, extra gig ram). I hate Macs but I really can't deal with these linux quirks right now. However, even if I had a mac a lot of my software is Linux only, the rest windows only so it sitll doesn't make much sense
 
Use dpkg properly and you can fix this!

Start with "man dpkg" and then purge KDE 3.7 and 4, then install KDE again (whichever version you want).

Should be fixed in no time at all.
 
The OS didn't die, your desktop environment was unavailable. There's a difference. If we were talking about a Windows box then I'd agree that it's pretty much the same thing because they are so inextricably linked, but I've borked XFCE lots of times but still had a working OS that I've been able to use to fix it.

As for fixing this, I think growse's and DRZ'z suggestions are both very good ones.

Just re-read my post and it sounds a bit agressive... I didn't mean it to, so apologies about the tone of it :)
 
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Yes, I know the graphical environment is separate to the OS kernel in nix. But without a GUI the OS is more or less useless for my work.
 
I currently have an older version of KDE running and this is sufficing. Next week I will replace my failed external disk, make an image of my drive (my important stuff is periodically updated but there is lots of other stuff i wouldn't like to loose). Then I will install the latest Kubunutu.
 
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