I just ran the dist-upgrade and noticed a line it spit out:

   grub installed for i386 system

Huh? This computer is 64 it.

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 9:56 AM, Michael Havens <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

that sounds like good advice! it makes a lot of sense. So then.... I will no longer do apt-get install upgade but only dist-upgrade.

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Brian Cluff <brian@snaptek.com> wrote:

The packages on your system were already in a bad state when I recommended you do that.  While the dist-upgrade might have lead to some of your computers symptoms, it was not the ultimate cause of your problems.
One thing that could happen with a dist-upgrade that won't happen with a plain upgrade in that it can remove (and add) packages in order to make your system completely up to date.  You shouldn't ever have a problem, but under very rare circumstances, the system will try to uninstall important packages that make your system run.  Usually after you've done something weird to your system, or when you've installed someone's PPA who doesn't know what they are doing with dependencies.
I'd suggest that you need to run dist-upgrade more often, not less or not at all.  On all my systems, I ONLY do dist-upgrade, I can't even remember the last time I did a simple upgrade.  Running it more often will keep your system more up to date and put all the necessary packages on your system for the software to work correctly rather than putting a subset of packages that will leave your system more and more out of date.

Think about it this way.  A piece of software has a security problem or wants to add features and the fix is to add in a new library that does something that fixes the problem.  If you just do an upgrade then apt will not upgrade that piece of software at all because it would require it to also install an additional package{s).  Now if there are other pieces of software that say they want a certain version of the first program in order to satisfy their dependencies those also won't get upgraded.  Do this over and over and before too long you have system where your desktop is in a very strange state where it up to date in some places and out of date in others.

It's best just to keep it completely up to date in the first place with dist-upgrade.

Brian Cluff

On 01/09/2016 04:49 AM, Michael Havens wrote:

You were oh so right Brian. I had changed the window manager in / home. Now whenever I restore root nothing is fixed. I will NEVER do a dist-upgrade again. Everytime I have my system crashes! Now I am trying to restore my home directory which was created with rsync. The exact command was:

rsync -aWuq --delete-before /home/bmike1/Documents /media/bmike1/RedSanDisk

What would the command be to restore My home directory. I figure it is easier to restore home (which I had just recently update) than to fix the window manager.

--

:-)~MIKE~(-:

---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss

---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss

--

:-)~MIKE~(-:

--

:-)~MIKE~(-: