Charles Blair wrote: > I am running debian 6.0.6 on a Toshiba laptop that is > approximately two years old.
You should consider keeping your machine updated with the latest security upgrades. Debian 6.0.7 is current for your system. You should also consider upgrading to Debian 7 "Wheezy" at some point. If you were upgraded to Debian 7 Wheezy then you could have installed "python3" and gotten 3.2.3 from precompiled packages. > The command python --version > reported 2.6.x. I wanted to upgrade to 3.3.2, so I > did the following things, some of which were apparently > mistakes. > > (1) I downloaded the .tgz for 3.3.2. from python.org, > typed ./configure, make, and make install. This did > not seem to produce any serious warnings. That isn't unreasonable. Seems fairly normal. Note that /usr/bin/python would be the system python. If you only did "./configure" with no options then the "make install" would have installed your newly compiled program in /usr/local/bin/python and there would have been no conflict. > (2) python --version said I was still using 2.6.x, But this is where you may have become confused. If you are using bash as your command shell then it would have "hashed" the path to python at /usr/bin/python. In that situation it would have continued to use that path even if a new binary showed up in PATH in /usr/local/bin ahead of it. (I think. IIRC anyway.) Therefore you may have installed the new python but continued to use the old one in that particular shell window. The bash command to instruct it to forget previous the cache of paths is 'hash -r'. After doing this the shell will once again search for the command and will find it in /usr/local/bin. $ hash -r I am assuming that you have /usr/local/bin in your PATH. > so [probably a Big Mistake] I typed > > apt-get remove python > > I think I made the further mistake of saying "go ahead" > when there was a warning. There are a *lot* of desktop packages that depend upon python being installed. On a headless server not so many. (The fail2ban package is the one very useful headless server package that requires python.) But on a desktop a lot of whizzy desktop things require python. When you remove python then all of those will be removed too. > (3) Then I repeated step (1), expecting this would > simply replace the older python with the newer one. Nope. It would install python at /usr/local/bin/python as it should do to keep your local installation separate from the system version. Also you don't really want to smash over the top of the system files in /usr/bin. That method leads to madness. Note that if you were in the 'staff' group then you would be able to run "make install" as yourself, not as root, and it would be able to install into the /usr/local tree. I think that is a much safer way of operating then running "# make install" or "sudo make install" as root. As root an error (or attack) in the makefile could crawl out of /usr/local and smash over your system version. > At this point, python --version was still saying 2.6.x, > but python3 --version said 3.3.2. Right. If you had said: $ type python python is hashed (/usr/bin/python) Then it would have been obvious. Then 'hash -r' and repeat. $ hash -r $ type python python is /usr/local/bin/python > However, after shutting down my machine, it became > clear that Something Bad had happened. Your machine booted okay though. So you can fix it. > (Bad #1) after entering username and password, I > get tty instead of graphics. Right. GNOME was removed when you removed python. I assume that you were running GNOME 2 before. (You said you were running Debian 6 "Squeeze".) Simply install GNOME again. > (Bad #2) the wireless connection has stopped working. Oops. Both NetworkManager and WICD need python. That will make this somewhat more interesting. But you can still recover from it relatively easily. Do not despair! :-) > There are probably other Bad Things as well, but I > decided at this point to ask the experts for help. Two things I will note first for reference. * /var/log/dpkg.log is a file that tracks what dpkg does on your system. You can work through it and determine exactly what packages were removed. * /var/backups/dpkg.status* is a set of backup copies of the status file. This is an even better source of info to work through what was installed so that you can install it again. I have written about it before so will just reference a recent message with the details: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2013/04/msg00263.html Plan: * Get back on the network * Re-install your removed desktop Networking: To get back on the network the easy thing is to plug into a wired network connection and then configure it. The wired interface is easy. After you have networking install then you can install your removed parts and then you will have wireless working again. # cp /etc/network/interfaces /root/interfaces.bak Edit /etc/network/interfaces. It will probably have commented out references to eth0. It probably needs to be set like this: auto lo iface lo inet loopback allow-hotplug eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp Then bring the interface up. You need root for this. Either log in, use 'su', or 'sudo'. # ifup eth0 That should get you networking again. With networking up and online everything else should be much easier. Simply install your missing desktop. At this point you need to tell us what desktop you were running. If you had selected wicd instead of NetworkManager. Thinks like that. Until then I will assume a standard installation. Since you are running a slightly older 6.0.6 instead of the current 6.0.7 there will be other updates too. I would do this: # apt-get update # apt-get install gnome-core # apt-get upgrade # apt-get dist-upgrade With that you should be able to log into the graphical environment again. You may not be 100% back to where you were before yet. But you should be in a much more pleasant state of operation. The next step would be to figure out what else needs to be installed. This is a way to figure out what was installed before and what is installed now and then generate a list of additional things to install. $ grep-dctrl -s Package -n "install ok installed" /var/backups/var/backups/dpkg.status.0 | sort > list.prev $ grep-status -s Package -n "install ok installed" | sort > list.now $ comm -3 list.prev list.now That will show what is different between then and now. I personally would just install the packages I recognized. But you can install everything one by one. apt-get install $(comm -3 list.prev list.now) However that will mark all of those as being manually installed instead of as a dependency and so those will never be offered as an autoremove candidate in the future. I would address that by after installing everything I would overwrite the dpkg status file with the one from /var/backups/apt.extended_states.0 or older appropriate file. I will be vague on details because better that you ask if you don't understand. Doing nothing at that point isn't as bad as it sounds but easy to correct. At that point you should have everything installed that you had installed before. Your wireless networking should work. You will need to restore your /etc/network/interfaces file. # ifdown eth0 # cp /root/interfaces.bak /etc/network/interfaces You will probably need to restart everything. But if I didn't screw up the above recipes then you should be in good shape. Be careful of any typos I may have made in the above. It is hard to do all of that from memory and not make a mistake somewhere. Ask more if you have questions. Good luck! Bob
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