Okay, I have a "beginner" "knoppix-installer" HDD install.

One of the suggestions was apt-get update. Well, I had tried that with devastating results, via dselect.

Essentially, it immediately wanted to eliminate all kinds of stuff like kdebase, upgrade other stuff, and so on. A lot of the upgrades were not able to be found, a lot of others stepped on the toes of preexisting packages and would not be installed.

So for the first case, I had to do without. For the second case, I had to deinstall the preexisting package, configure the broken selection, and then reinstall the preexisting package.

So far, so good.

But when I went to reboot the system, I found that all the autodetection was broken; it spent 5 minutes trying to hook up random modules and erroring out; and the mouse was permanently broken. My solution? To try to reinstall knoppix, which wanted to erase the HDD. With as much broken as there was, it was inordinately difficult for me to save our home directories -- I ended up just formatting over it. I didn't lose everything, because we keep a lot of stuff on the Windows side, as well.

But having reinstalled knoppix, I am now trying again to do a dselect get-update, fresh, to see better what happens.

Meanwhile, if others have suggestions -- including how to undo dselect requests for an update -- I'd be glad to hear of it.

And to those who are arguing how you learn, that's how *I* learn. Not by man, not by asking questions, but by blowing it up and then examining all the little pieces, and finally publishing and asking for opinions. The nuclear physicist method, if you will. Flame away, when you get done rofling.