Chris Tillman wrote: > Use dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 -- although I'm not sure that was > available in potato. Also, woody's xfree 86 has much better support > for powerpc hardware, so it might be a better idea to just upgrade > now. That will straighten out a lot of problems.
Chris, Potato does have dpkg-reconfigure, but it returned some message (sorry not to quote it accurately) about not being able to work on xserver-xfree86. I eventually decided (for reasons I'll explain) to bite the bullet and do an apt-get upgrade. It failed completely and while it doesn't matter at this point (I'll explain that, too), I'm curious about what I did wrong. Basically I replaced the word potato with the word woody in sources.list and told it: apt-get dist-upgrade. When it failed, it suggested I do: apt-get update to replace missing files, so I did. That did something, but as far as I can tell, not very much (sorry again not to have preserved the specific messages it returned). It did return a lot of "404-not found" errors, though. I did not rerun apt-get dist-upgrade, however, so I don't know if the results of that would have been different. Anyway, I would be interested if you have any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong here. But, At this point, my original kernel (2.2.17) will no longer boot up at all, returning error messages about (as far as I can tell) bad sectors in the swap partition. (Although the later kernel -- which actually proved to only be a 2.2.20 -- will boot up, but, as before, won't do the GUI.) Basically, I think the drive itself is physically shot (based on other evidence as well) and I am going to be best off doing an entirely new installation of woody on a new drive :-( Oh, well... Anyway, thanks for all your advice and help so far and if you have any further observations on any of the above, I would be interested to hear them as well. Mike >
