Kubuntu killed by adept?

I installed gutsy gibbon on my old HP Omnibook 900 (Pentium II 300 MHz, 160 meg RAM, 40 gig HD) a few months back. The sound, usb and wireless (Airlink 101 PCMCIA card) didn't work so I put it aside until this past weekend (Victoria Day long weekend here in Canada). After scouring the internet and messing with the audio drivers, I got the sound working, and not only that, somehow the wireless card started working as well .

So now that the computer had an internet connection, I fired up the Adept package manager to download updates. After checking everything out it reported some 200 megs of updates to download. I started the downloading and headed for bed. In the morning, I checked the computer to find that Adept had crashed. There was a window about checking the backtrace, but when I clicked on it another window popped up saying backtrace had no information. I noticed the menus had cleaned up (before every menu item was prefixed with "entries in xxxxx"), but I couldn't get Adept restarted so I tried rebooting.

Rebooting gets as far as the GRUB loader. Selecting Ubuntu gets an Error 15, file not found. Selecting the Ubuntu recovery mode gets the same error. Windows still boots normally.

Is my Ubuntu installation totally trashed? Is there a way to figure out which file is missing and replace just that file?

I can reinstall from scratch if I have to, but it takes a LOOOONG time on this ancient hardware and if I had to go that route I'll try hardy heron instead.

 

Adept has been crashing for years....I would install Kubuntu 8.04 final over....actually, that's some slim hardware....can you deal with Xubuntu? I liked it but had a BT problem because it was still in beta and went back to Kubuntu.

 

Thanks Zoid. I just downloaded Kubuntu 8.04 and will give it a go. Is there another package manager you would recommend?

Yep, that is very slim hardware. It couldn't handle the regular Ubuntu 7.10 installation, but it did work with the Kubuntu alternate install CD. I'm just getting my feet wet with Linux and didn't want to mess with the computers I use for work.

 

Adept 'add/remove' programs is OK. Don't uninstall Adept Manager (the one that crashes), just install Synaptic from the repo's and use it....many Kubuntu users do that, if not all

 

That's a pretty old computer lol - you may want to try something a little less intensive than KDE - XFCE would be a good choice.

As for Adept, definitely use Synaptic if you want a graphical manager. However, just using apt-get from the terminal is usually a lot faster/easier.

 

I second srunni's suggestion of using apt-get from the command line. It is really not that hard.

I actually use wajig as a command line front-end to apt-get, apt-cache, deborphan, and a bunch of other tools. I can issue all package management commands with wajig: wajig update, wajig upgrade, wajig search. I know how to use the apt tools directly but in the heat of the moment I often forget what tool does what so I issue commands like apt-get search blah, get an error and then remember that I must issue apt- cache search blah. wajig simplifies that.

It also keeps a log in your home of all the installations and removals you perform. It is possible to get the same information from the system logs but they contain a lot of unneeded stuff. The logs wajig creates are just more useful.

 

My comment probably won't help anybody, but I can also confirm that Adept sucks. Adept has hosed my Kubuntu installation before as well. My advice; don't use it. Learn APT from the command line instead. Its amazing how fast you can get things done through the command line.

 

Srunni - I looked back at the CD I burned for 7.10 and see that I labelled it Xubuntu. I think I had intended to go for X but must have hit the wrong link and downloaded K.

theZoid, srunni & lemur - thank you for your suggestions. I started the install of Kubuntu 8.04 late last night and this morning used Adept to remove Bluetooth support, which this computer will never need. I'm going to try your suggestions for updating once I get the wireless working again.

I will also have to try Xubuntu once I get Kubuntu figured out. That was the version I had originally intended to try, but more recently I've heard the XFCE interface is harder to learn so I've got to give my old, tired brain cells a break.

{edit} Bog, just saw your comment. I wonder why the Kubuntu people keep putting Adept in if its so flaky?

 

I don't know, but I think either this latest version of Kubuntu or the next one has the newest version of Adept (3.0). Lets hope that it brings stability improvements.

 

You may want to try out LinuxMint on that thing, it may not be as fast as Xubuntu, or Arch but it'll be easy to use out of the box.

 

Mint buries Adept Manager from the menu and installs Kpackage, which of course you can yourself. I still prefer Synaptic in KDE.

 

An update: I got the sound working in Hardy by making the same changes as I did last time with Gutsy. This time, however, the wireless didn't magically start working.

Kdenetworkmanager seems to detect the wireless adapter and lets me try to connect to a wireless network, but the progress bar always stalls at 28% and then times out. After I made a few attempts at connecting, kdenetworkmanager crashed and shut down.

I checked kinfocenter and got a clue as to why the wireless worked before when I got the sound sorted out, it seems the Neomagic audio/video chip in the computer shares IRQ 10 with the wireless card.

I'll keep trying to mess with it, if anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them.