Exceeded limit of symlinks on Xubuntu Dapper

[Tommy Trussell]

How can you determine the "limit of symlinks" on a system? Is it
determined by the amount of RAM or is it a hard setting in the
filesystem or something? If the system is complaining about it is
there a setting that can be bumped up, or do I just need to start
over? I'm running an old Pentium 200 MMX system, recently upgraded to
Dapper Xubuntu.

I'm trying to play around with a CMS called Typo3. One of the things
about Typo3 is it has TONS of symlinks. I had tried and failed to get
it completely working on a shared (commercial) host account SO I
thought I would try the nice Debian packages in Ubuntu.

The final package install complained about one missing symlink from
the source directory to a directory called "latest," so I tried to
create the "latest" link myself -- and it wouldn't go. Every time I
tried, the symlink appeared in a directory below the one I was trying
to put it in. I read and reread the man pages. I used ln -s with all
sorts of different variations on the syntax, and I even tried cp -s
but had even more disastrous results. I uninstalled and reinstalled
the packages several times and deleted the directories just in case I
had messed them up.

Finally I came up with the bright idea to go ahead and let the symlink
go wherever it wanted and then I mv'ed the link where I wanted it.
Success! HOWEVER when I tried to USE it the system complained I had
too many levels of symlinks.

A googled sage somewhere said to use the namei command to diagnose
problems... ok ... yes, here's a problem... what do I do? (And if the
best answer is to format the drive and start over that's OK by me. But
if so I will move the 200 gig drive to a faster box than a Pentium 200
with 192 Mb RAM so I don't waste so much time on the next try.)

> twt at p200:/var/lib/typo3-quickstart$ cd tslib
> -bash: cd: tslib: Too many levels of symbolic links
> twt at p200:/var/lib/typo3-quickstart$ namei
> usage: namei [-mx] pathname [pathname ...]
> twt at p200:/var/lib/typo3-quickstart$ namei typo3
> f: typo3
>  l typo3 -> typo3_src/typo3
>    l typo3_src -> /usr/share/typo3/latest
>      d /
>      d usr
>      d share
>      d typo3
>      l latest -> latest
>        l latest -> latest
>          l latest -> latest
>            l latest -> latest
>              l latest -> latest
>                l latest -> latest
>                  l latest -> latest
>                    l latest -> latest
>                      l latest -> latest
>                        l latest -> latest
>                          l latest -> latest
>                            l latest -> latest
>                              l latest -> latest
>                                l latest -> latest
>                                  l latest -> latest
>                                    l latest -> latest
>                                      l latest -> latest
>                                        l latest -> latest
>                                          l latest -> latest  *** EXCEEDED UNIX L IMIT OF SYMLINKS ***
>    ? typo3 - No such file or directory (2)
> twt at p200:/var/lib/typo3-quickstart$
>
>