This is not the first time I have been hurt by apt-get update.

Last night, I did an 'apt-get update' followed by 'apt-get upgrade'. When I rebooted, I couldn't. Among the upgrades was a lot of stuff dealing with the Xserver - XFree86, kdm, many fonts, and assorted bits and pieces. Well I get a far as the welcome window and when I select my userid, supply the password, and 'Go'; the screen turns blank and a few seconds later I am back at the welcome wiindow. Same thing when I tried to login as root. I did manage to login in console mode and proceeded to backup everything in my home directory and /usr/local.

I usually do the 'update and upgrade' thing every weekend. I use the same sources.list that came with Knoppix. It has the usual suspects - security, stable, testing, unstable, and a bunch of strange ones for mozilla, xfree86, etc. In the past I have upgraded stuff only to find that one package or other had stopped working. So where is the quality check??? Some people have told me to stick to stable and testing; others have said that for knoppix one really needs those strange entries. Any thoughts would be welcome.

I figure that at the very least, I should have a backup procedure that that would allow me to back out an update. So my first question is "Does anyone have such a backup script that only saves the things that need to be saved?" and my second question is "What directories would need to be saved?" I would guess that they include '/etc' , '/sbin', '/bin', '/usr' . Is it reasonable to try protecting oneself? Is there no way to back out bad updates? They will occur in the best of planned situations.

I tried another 'update - upgrade' cycle to no essential benefit. Next, I will do a dist-upgrade. I have also ordered a new Knoppix disk and if I am still X-less when it arrives, I guess I will reinstall Knoppix. My guess is that I am dead until then.