RH 9 dist-upgrade problem

[John Velman]

I've been using Fedora to keep my RH 9 up to date for some time now with
no problem.  Synaptic always hangs on trying to install or upgrade
something, but apt-get works with no problem.  Synaptic is still good as a
visual index to what's installed, what can be upgraded, and so on.

Having recently gotten an upgrade of synaptic, I tried a dist-upgrade
using synaptic.  (Whether this has anything to do with my problem, I don't
know, but for completeness --.)  As before, it hung after downloading
things.  There were a bunch of upgrades that became available a couple of
days ago (list below).

So, I killed synaptic, and did an apt-get dist-upgrade.

Then, had to go run some errands.  Shutdown the machine.  I've been using a
standard RH 9 boot using the RH version of what I guess is a gnome WM.
When I rebooted, the login display refused to start and gave the following
message:



        Failed to start the display server several times 
        in a short time period; disabling display :0

                       <OK>

I guess this is at the xdm login screen before I even get to the window
manager, but I'm out of my depth here.  I'll probably learn more than I
want to know about startup before I'm finished with this problem!

On accepting <OK> I got a console login.

Well, fortunately I found twm, set up a simple .xinitrc in my $HOME, and
was able to get a gui going with startx.  (I hasten to add that I use
console windows a lot -- mutt, vim, prolog, postresql... So I'm not
completely powerless without Xwindows.  but I also use acroread, gv, gui
web browsers, the pan newsreader and the occaisional graphics program.)


_Most_ things that I use seem to work.  Pan gives the following
error message on startup:

	(pan:3786): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading menu image: Image header
	corrupt

but it seems to work OK (so far!).

When I try to start synaptic, I get:

$ synaptic &
** (synaptic:3860): WARNING **: Cannot open font file for font Luxi Sans
10

(synaptic:3860): Gtk-CRITICAL **: file gtkwidget.c: line 1756
(gtk_widget_hide): assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

[3]+  Done                    synaptic $

Some others:

Dia fails to start and says:
 
$ dia
Warning: program compiled against libxml 205 using older 204

** (dia:3243): WARNING **: Cannot open font file for font Luxi Sans 10

** (gnome_segv:3246): WARNING **: Cannot open font file for font Luxi Sans 10
$ 

Sodipodi starts but gives the message:
$ sodipodi &
[1] 3248
$ Warning: program compiled against libxml 205 using older 204


Galeon seems to work, as does Mozilla firebird.



The packages that I "upgraded" today were:

XFree86-tools_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-truetype-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-twm_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-xauth_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-xdm_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-xfs_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-base-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-devel_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-font-utils_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-ISO8859-9-100dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-ISO8859-9-75dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-libs_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-libs-data_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-Mesa-libGL_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-Mesa-libGLU_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-100dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm XFree86_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-75dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-ISO8859-15-100dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-ISO8859-15-75dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
glibc_2.3.2-27.9.7_i686.rpm
glibc-devel_2.3.2-27.9.7_i386.rpm
nscd_2.3.2-27.9.7_i386.rpm
glibc-common_2.3.2-27.9.7_i386.rpm
postgresql72-libs_1-4.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-contrib_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-devel_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-docs_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-jdbc_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-libs_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm postgresql-pl_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-python_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-server_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-tcl_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-test_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm ethereal_0.9.16-0.90.1_i386.rpm
ethereal-gnome_0.9.16-0.90.1_i386.rpm


Any ideas what is bad and how to fix it?

In a way I think this cloud has a silver lining.  I have an old slow
machine and was beginning to be a bit unhappy with the weight of bells and
whistles in the standard RH9 user interface-- was thinking of going to
something lighter--but not necessarily today!.

My only problem with twm so far is that I'm using it with all defaults and
I can't seem to adapt to the way it likes to hang on to the focus of the
previous window when I think it should change.  But I'm sure to find some
apps that I would like to use that don't work, sooner or later.

Yesterday in haste I posted this on the linux.redhat newsgroup and
met with very little sympathy.  Messages to the effect: "that's what
you deserve for doing a massive upgrade like that all at once."

Hope someone here will be more sympathetic.


Best,

John Velman
velman at cox.net