On Tuesday 14 February 2006 02:39 pm, Mike kindly wrote: > the broken repositories isn't my fault . It is (as I've read) going > through a period of instability. > Or is my understanding of that skewed? > I don't know if this is relevant to your problem, but the older versions of Mepis, possibly the one you're still using, had big, ugly problems with updating/upgrading its' packages. I tried updating it once and everything broke. IIRC, there were one or two packages or libraries that had to be excluded from the system update or else everything would break. I'm sorry I can't be more specific, but it was a long time ago. I'm sure if you went to the Mepis User forum you could find out about it. You've had so many problems with this, here's what I suggest: Get a recent version of Mepis, or my preference, PCLinuxOS. Buy a preburned disk or get someone in PLUG to burn you one and test it. I get my disks for 99 cents plus shipping from www.edmunds-enterprises.com . I've heard that the recent version of Mepis is buggy, but the PCLinuxOS I'm using has been rock stable and the repositories work great. It uses Synaptic. Boot from the live-cd, find your /home on the harddrive, copy anything you need to save to a disk or send it to gmail or somewhere for safekeeping. Use cfdisk or some good partitioning program to reformat your harddrive and make new partitions. You could also use badblocks from the live-cd to overwrite your harddrive and make it like new, then partition it. I much prefer PClinuxOS's partitioning and installation to Mepis', but it's your choice. Just start anew and get a clean installation with up-to-date packages and repositories. Siri Amrit -- Tigerflag Natural Perfumery, LLC www.tigerflag.com --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss