Debian upgrade problem

Hi - I am a fairly new Debian user & have been running 3.0 for about 3 months.

Over the weekend I decided to try and upgrade to Unstable on a whim and ran into some problems.

Firstly, during the upgrade, apt-get managed to get into a dependency loop when it tried to replace libpam-modules and (after googling for help) I was forced to use the Force-LoopBreak option to continue.

Eventually the update finished, but now I can't start X. I get an error message to the effect of 'client cannot connect to x server due to XDM- AUTHENTICATION-1 key'.

During the update process, apt-get displayed a warning about the fact that it couldn't restart xdmwithout killing my X session. To get around tis, I halted the update and CTRL-ALT-F2'd to a new virtual console and carried on from there.

Typically, this all happened on my home machine so I don't have the exact error messages to hand. Sigh - I have become exactly the kind of user that winds me up no end at work.

Anyone got any ideas? I had thought about uninstalling all things X and reinstalling them again in case there was some kind of verson conflict. This seems a bit bit drastic, though.

Is it just a case of needing to generate an XDM-AUTHENTICATION key? How do I do this?

Thanks for your help,

Did you check the debian-devel list first? Unstable sometimes has problems, and they are usually mentioned there.

Did you use dist-upgrade? You should have.

Post the _exact_ error message.

The best place for Debian questions is the debian-user mailing list.

I'm not sure a 'fairly new' Debian user should be using unstable. Try testing.

I second John Hasler's recommendation of the Debian-User mailing

Thanks. It wasn't a 'critical' box - just used for messing around wqith at home, so I will probably just hose it down and reinstall Woody.

It seems many users including me have this problem after the last update from 4.2.1-6 to 4.2.1-7 this weekend. there already is a thread in debian.maint.x

After removing any .Xauthority and .xsession* Files i could run 'startx' as root (only for testing!). To get into kde as normal user, i also had to change my Loginmanger from kdm to gdm (dpkg-reconfigure gdm). Hope this helps.

I know there are very attractive things in unstable. However, I'll second the suggestion of others that you already have gotten.

Please consider why exactly it is that you're trying to upgrade. Is it GNOME2? Is it KDE3? Or a new X? Consider the unofficial backports made for Woody, available at apt-get.org . Even then, you must understand you're not running Debian stable anymore after that.

However, if you do decide to upgrade to either testing or unstable, use dselect. I know its user interface is not extremely user-friendly, but it never fails. Unless unstable happens to be broken at the moment

Be aware that no one produces security updates for 'testing'. (You just get to wait until the fixes propagate from 'unstable'.)

You could also set 'AuthNames=MIT-MAGIC-COOKE-1' or 'Authorize=False' in kdmrc. At least for me only XDM-AUTHORIZATION was broken (only figured this out after fooling with it for several hours after filing my bug report). There seem to be new X packages today, so hopefully this is