Topic: "Respawing too fast": apt-get warning

[Daniele Procida]

Probably other people are more circumspect, but in case you are tempted to try it, be careful with apt-get on SME.

On both 5.6 and 6.0v3, installing apt-get, then running it to upgrade all the packages in its database, will result in a damaged system.

One of the updates evidently does something that it doesn't like, because instead of displaying the configuration screen at the console it says (paraphrased):

INIT "id1" respawning too fast: disabling for 5 minutes

I think that's tty1. The command prompt is still available from the console on another tty, and most of the rest of the system still seems to work (at least in the case of 6.0 - in the case of 5.6 the whole thing had become a disaster area, but I think that may have been my doing).

I don't know why running apt-get does this, but it did it twice, once on a fresh installation. My expertise with Linux doesn't extend to finding out what went wrong, though I'd be interested to know why apt-get can't be safely used.

I hope this information is useful to someone.

Daniele

[Tom Haynes]

I have had this happen before when I "upgraded" newt as part of a project. It breaks the admin login.

Reinstall the original newt from this page http://www.maxtux.co.uk/dist/esmith/5.6/cd/e-smith/RPMS/

[Charlie Brady]

Daniele Procida wrote:

> On both 5.6 and 6.0v3, installing apt-get, then running it to
> upgrade all the packages in its database, will result in a
> damaged system.

I'm not surprised.

> I don't know why running apt-get does this, ...

It's because SME server is not RedHat linux. Many of the packages are shared with RedHat linux, but not all. Where the packages have diverged, they've diverged for a reason. Installing the RedHat version of such a package will break something, and running apt-get may install the RedHat version of a package.

Charlie