(repost): update problem broke my hoary today

[Philippe Landau]

hello Mike

> Apologies for reposting my problem, no replies/help received yet, and my 
> Hoary install is still broken. I sure would appreciate some suggestions 
> on how to fix this problem. No gui or network is available, and I am 
> short on ideas for the next step. (Warty in another partition on the 
> same machine works fine)
as hoary is still experimental,
what do you think about installing it again ?

kind regards     philippe

--
> --------------------------------------
> 
> Haven't started Hoary for a day - started OK, then I let Synaptic do the 
> updates it wanted - something didn't go right, and now when I reboot, 
> login screen appears, I enter user and password, and a moment later a 
> terminal window appears with the message "There was an error creating 
> the child process for this terminal". Clicking OK removes the error 
> message, leaving the terminal, but no prompt.
> 
> Now Ctrl-Alt-F1 for a real terminal, log in OK. No network is available 
> (eth0 or ath0, depending on which card is plugged into the PCMCIA slot).
> 
> Same symptoms when recovery mode boot option is used.
> 
> Shown on the screen is
> * PCMCIA not present
> * Starting Postfix Mail Transport Agent... [ ok ]
> then several occurances of
> Usage: modprobe [-v] etc (this is probably a clue),
> a few other normal looking commands, then the login:
> 
> Help...!
>