Lots of Dapper Problems

Tue Jul 4 15:03:22 UTC 2006

Thanks.  I moved /etc/fonts out of the way, got a fontconfig .deb file
from packages.ubuntulinux.org, installed it, and then moved my font
configuration back in.  APT seems to be back in action.

Still, these other issues are baffling.  Is there a better place to
look for support on these kinds of problems?  Is it possible to talk
to Canonical directly, or to talk to the people who make the
installation CD's?

I'll reprint my original issues:

I'm trying to upgrade two machines from Breezy to Dapper.  Even though
the machines are very different (one is an IBM ThinkPad, the other a
homebuilt AMD64 machine), they are having frustratingly similar
problems.

I followed the same procedure on both machines: change breezy to
dapper in /etc/apt/sources.lst, sudo apt-get update, then sudo apt-get
dist-upgrade.

Both machines are having the following problems:

 - GDM can't create a session for me.  Instead, it gives me an error
message and a WM-less xterm.  I can run gnome-session from here, or I
can use XDM instead of GDM, but neither of these are really ideal.
There is more detailed information here -
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=196830

 - Neither machine can find its sound card.  The sound card comes up
in 'lspci' on both machines, but no sound-playing program will believe
that there is a sound card attached to my computer.  Even alsamixer
tells me there's no card attached.  I've tried modprobing the
appropriate modules - this changes the error message, but doesn't
solve the problem.  There is more information here -
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=199140

I considered doing a fresh install from a Dapper install CD, but even
this caused problems for me.  On my desktop (I haven't tried this
approach on my laptop yet). The installer starts a series of services
and then starts GDM and "HP Printing and Imaging service".  At this
point, the screen goes blank and nothing can be done about it.  I've
tried the alternate CD; I've tried various VGA modes; I've tried doing
the CD consistency check (both were fine);  I've tried booting with
the debian-installer/framebuffer=false boot flag.  No dice - no dice
whatsoever.  I have a hunch this is a video card problem (ATi Radeon
9250SE), but I don't know what to do about it.

If a fresh install is the only way to fix this, then I'd appreciate
any help getting my live CD to boot.  Otherwise, I'd like to get sound
and GDM working and fix my laptop's broken APT repositories.

Thanks for your time,
Bill Atkins

On 7/4/06, Mario Vukelic <mario.vukelic at dantian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-07-03 at 17:39 -0400, Bill Atkins wrote:
> > Well, like I said, the APT problem only exists on my laptop.  My
> > desktop is still having the sound, GDM, and install CD problems.
> >
> > The "apt-get -f install" and "dpkg --configure -a" suggestions in
> > Troubleshooting give me the same errors as any other apt-get
> > operation.
>
> Oh, I overlooked that you are talking about more than 1 machine, sorry.
> Did you install ubuntu-desktop before upgrading? If not, you might want
> to try to now (on all the machines). It might sort things out a bit, but
> I doubt it can do anything about the laptop's apt problem at this point.
> I'm going to concentrate on the apt problem for now. It starts with
> this:
>
> Setting up fontconfig (2.3.2-1.1ubuntu12) ...
> ln: creating symbolic link
> `/etc/fonts/conf.d/30-debconf-no-bitmaps.conf' to
> `/etc/fonts/conf.d/no-bitmaps.conf': File exists
>
> And this causes other problems down the road. I'd suggest we try to
> resolve this first. fontconfig tries to create a link called 30-... to
> the file no-..., but fails for some reasons. The /etc/fonts/conf.d
> directory looks like this on my computer. Please paste your version in a
> reply (using the ls -l command)
>
> ls -l /etc/fonts/conf.d/
> total 32
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   32 2006-05-19 23:47 20-debconf-sub-pixel.conf
> -> /etc/fonts/conf.d/sub-pixel.conf
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   33 2006-05-19 23:47 30-debconf-no-bitmaps.conf
> -> /etc/fonts/conf.d/no-bitmaps.conf
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  250 2005-05-04 21:51 autohint.conf
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  306 2005-05-04 21:51 no-bitmaps.conf
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  257 2005-05-04 21:51 no-sub-pixel.conf
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  256 2005-05-04 21:51 sub-pixel.conf
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  597 2006-04-19 00:33 ttf-arphic-ukai
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1627 2006-05-24 22:07 ttf-arphic-uming
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  247 2005-05-04 21:51 unhinted.conf
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  296 2005-05-04 21:51 yes-bitmaps.conf
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Bill Atkins