Help!

[rhu]

I have a server that's running Debian sarge. I wanted to install subversion, and I discovered that I needed to edit my sources.conf file for aptitude, since it still referenced "stable" rather than "sarge." So Tuesday I did that. Although I was surprised at the number of files that aptitude was touching, I didn't realize until just now that it had decided that most of my installed packages were was no longer what I wanted installed. (I assume that was since it still thought of them as "stable" and now I said I want "sarge".)

This morning we had a power failure whose duration (1h) exceeded my UPS's charge (30min), so the computer rebooted.

Now I don't have enough of X to start vncserver. It complains that I lack an .Xsession file, any window managers at all, etc.

It turns out I don't even have aptitude anymore.

Apache, Exim, and sshserver are all working fine. So this isn't a crisis, but I'd like to get it solved by the end of the weekend.

I tried reinstalling aptitude from http://packages.debian.org/testing/admin/aptitude but of course it has dependencies; now, if I had a working aptitude, I could get aptitude working again. Gack.

What's the fastest way for me to get back to a working aptitude? From there I think I could restore the system.

Or am I better off taking this opportunity to upgrade to etch?

Comments

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

apt-get -f install aptitude

*phew!*