Update Troubles

[ward]

Happily ran Mint-Debian-Xfce through two Debian upgrades. The update a month ago damaged Xfce so badly it would not run from the command-line. Downloaded & installed the latest distribution today; it ran satisfactorily. Then installed the 1672-upgrades. Well, those that Upgrade Manager could find. Again lost the GUI. Neither Firefox nor Xfce would run from the command-line.

How wrong would I be to ignore updates if everything I use works to my satisfaction?

[cwsnyder]

I've got some questions for you: Did you use the Mint Update Manager, or did you use the Debian one?
Did you try startx, gdm, or lightdm to start the GUI again?

As far as running without updates, you would be fine, if you never, ever attempt to run Firefox or otherwise connect to the Internet.

Below is my sources.list for updates, only the virtualbox.org is added to the standard Linux Mint Debian Edition repositories.

Code: Select all

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import backport romeo
deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest testing main contrib non-free
deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest/security testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest/multimedia testing main non-free
deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian wheezy contrib

[ward]

Hi cwsnyder! Thank you for your response.

Used whatever XFCE opened; presumably Mint Update Manager.

What to do about the 25% of files that could not be found? If any are dependencies, ...

Will update and try startx, gdm, & lightdm to see what happens.

Definitely need Firefox. Had to drop it in Vista because I could not stop Flash from crashing. Went to Comodo IceDragon.

[cwsnyder]

On one of my updates, I went from Lightdm to MDM (Mint Display Manager), which since I had added commands to the lightdm.conf, did not get translated properly. I presume that is what caused my LMDE Xfce install to crash and I had to re-install, and may have caused your video to crash as well.

If you find that you have mdm as your login manager you may also have been burned by that update.