Okay, all looks good now. The dist-upgrade appears to have worked, mail is being sent and received, and my manual fixes to grub's menu.lst seemed to work well until it got to the point of starting the Gnome Display Manager. An alert panel (text mode) popped saying:
Server Authorization directory (daemon/ServAuthDir) is set to /var/lib/gdm but is not owned by user 108 and group 113. Please correct the ownership or GDM configuration and restart GDM. OK Now, /var/lib/gdm is listed as user and group gdm, and ls -ldn of /var/lib/gdm shows it is owned by user 108 and group 113. gdm is in /etc/passwd (uid 108) and /etc/groups (gid 113). Directory permissions are: drwxr-x--- 3 108 113 4096 2009-01-05 16:39 /var/lib/gdm drwxr-x--- 3 gdm gdm 4096 2009-01-05 16:39 /var/lib/gdm Unfortunately, there appears no way to make the highlighted OK apply - Enter does nothing, and I can't even Ctrl-Alt-Bksp since X isn't running. A ps revealed something called whiptail running with that error message, so I killed that. Things proceeded, with an error saying that gdm would not be started, and I was at a text console. But / had been mounted read-only. I rebooted again, and this time there was a message about md1 (i.e. /) not runninmg, and did I want to try to start it. It timed out while I was reading that and dropped me to busybox. I rebooted a 3rd time and this time it proceeded past that point but said the root filesystem was dirty, and fscked it. But that failed with an error that it required a manual fsck. I did that, and it fixed maybe 12~20 errors, and I rebooted. Actually it then presented me with the Resume/Fix packages/FS check/... text choices panel thing, so I tried to TAB to choose Resume and after a while text appeared in the middle asking if I wanted to list all N-thousand possibilities so obviously the screen hadn't been cleared and I was back at a dirty text console running bash. So I again did the Ctrl-Alt-Del and the reboot proceeded. This time all was well. Even the nvidia driver is in place and working, with my hand-crafted twinview xorg.conf, whereas previously each new kernel install required stopping X (GDM), running the nvidia script, and restarting GDM. Brilliant! luke -- package update-manager 1:0.93.34 failed to install/upgrade: ErrorMessage: SystemError in cache.commit(): E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/313959 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs