[Novalug] best way to back up a home partition.

[DonJr]

On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 11:28 -0400, gregory pryzby wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 11:23:35AM -0400, Bonnie Dalzell wrote:
> > 
> > this resulted in loosing the ability to start up x - when you try startx 
> > you get the error:
> > 
> > xinit connection refused (error111)
> > 

I{and/or the list} would need a lot more information to be of any real
help at all.
 But check the permissions of /tmp and that /dev is properly set up.

> > trying to get alien to install resulted in a report that the dependencies 
> > were broken - apt-get was not able to get rpm which is needed for alien to 
> > work.
> 
> aptitude is 'better' for ubuntu and what is recommend iirc. 
>  

Gregory,
  Please explain why you think aptitude is 'better'?

  Or what feature does aptitude have that apt-get doesn't have that
might solve this problem?

I personally don't care for aptitude because of how the "auto-uninstall
unused packages" feature was shoehorned in with no way {that I know of}
to simply and completely disable it.
  Note Aptitude's "auto-package" feature {and database/record ?} isn't
an APT-interface supplied/handled feature.

> > another problem I had - part of the reason for tryign to upgrade - was 
> > that I could not compile the tar.gz version of anything because the 
> > install routines wanted to call cc and apparently my system has gcc and 
> > is not set up to tell the installer routines that cc and gcc are the same.
> > 
> > I have a lot to learn.

Bonnie,
 Sounds to me like 'update-alternatives' settings need to be checked

   update-alternatives --display cc

{ should return something like:
   cc - status is auto.
    link currently points to /usr/bin/gcc
   /usr/bin/gcc - priority 20
    slave cc.1.gz: /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz
  Current `best' version is /usr/bin/gcc.
}

 and possible updated if required.
  The safest way may be to simply reinstall the package 'gcc' if that's
what's required.

-- DonJr