downgrading xfree86 with apt-get!

[SlCKB0Y]

OK, here's the story. I have debian woody, but woody from when it had xfree86 4.0.1 in it. Now besides really disliking, i seem to have a problem with it and any program that uses full screen.

I have a voodoo3 2000 agp that was working perfectly under xfree 3.3.6

1. i tried to install the glide2x stuff, and the test you need to run worked absolutely *fine* except when the test was finished, x just completely locked up, and not even ctrl+alt+backspace would work its charm...timew to hit the reset button

2. whenever i try to use vmware in full screen mode, it does exactly the same thing: locks up and i have to reset.

Now these two things are really annoying me, and i can see one of two options, both of which i need help from you guys

[b]
either, why is this problem happening, has anyone else had it, and how can i fix it?...otherwise...

how can i downgrade the x i am using? to do this i assume i would need to remove all traces of the current X, but how do i do this? how do i know which packages are included in task-x-window-system to make sure i get them all as i think there a few, and secondly, how do i force the removal as no doubt a lot of programs depend on x, and its various components.

after i have removed it all, i will keep woody in my sources.list, and then do a apt-get task-x-window-system again, and then i should have 3.3.6 on my system and all will be well.


thanks in advance for any help.

[Craig McPherson]

Make sure you comment-out any X 4.0 stuff from your sources.list, then uninstall and reinstall your X packages -- there's no direct downgrade action. Make sure you complete the uninstallation before you re-select them for installation.

[SlCKB0Y]

What i meant was, there are a lot of packages on my system, and basically all i did to install all of the xfree86 4 stuff was the following (all i had in the sources.list at the time was a line for woody, as x4 came with woody then)

apt-get install task-x-window-system

So my question is, how can i find all the packages that are installed by this virtual package (task-x-window-system), and will i need to force their removal?

I can't quite figure out the syntax of the required commands to force the removal of a package.

i ran dpkg --force-help gave me some hints as follows to possible commands but it would be good if someone could help me here with an example.

dpkg --force-depends
dpkg --ignore-depends=packagename

these two seem to be the likely candidates, but how do i use them in conjunction with with both the -r command and also the package name, thus forcing the reomval of a given package?

dpkg -r --ignore-depends=packagename ??

thanks for any help

[Craig McPherson]

If you uninstall the xfree86-common package, all the other X packages will be uninstalled automatically, because they all depend (directly or indirectly) on xfree86-common.

You might want to jot down what it removes so you can reinstall them afterwards.

[SlCKB0Y]

Im grateful for your help, but im not unstanding what you are saying at all Craig. I tried to use dselect to remove xfree86-common, and it took most of the packages out of the opt-x section. But when i went thru the list in dselect, there were a lot of other file with the version number 4.0.1-8 giving away the fact that they came with xfree86 4. Things such as the xlibs and the like fall into this catagory.

They werent removed when i took out xfree86-common, but yet i know they were installed when i installed task-x-window-system, and i would like to get rid of them so that all my x window packages have a 3.3.6 version included.

So then i try to remove these xlib stuff and then all these programs like gnome and sawfish start complaining about dependancies.

its not really working for me how i would like it to.

Inconsistancy like this drives me mad, and im likely just to reinstall everything and be ****ed with it.

I dont think this whole thing was particularly smart on the part of debians organisers.

[Craig McPherson]

Well, the only way this is going to work (normally) is to remove EVERY package that depends on any of the X stuff, including your window managers, then reinstall X 3.x, then reinstall all your other X programs. That's the only way you're going to do it with apt & dselect.

HOWEVER, you can manually download older .debs, and install them with dpkg -i (you might have to use a --force option to tell it that yes, you really do want to downgrade). You can't downgrade with dselect or apt, but you can with dpkg... you just have to grab all the packages yourself.

Either way, this is going to be a pretty big undertaking. Unfortunately Debian upgrade are pretty one-way right now... the only way to downgrade is to either do it manually with dpkg, or remove the package(s) and ALL its dependencies and then install the older version with apt or dselect once you've dyked the newer versions out of your sources.list.

You might want to ask this on the debian-user mailing list (http://lists.debian.org/), they have very helpful gurus on there who know how to do stuff with the package manager software that I couldn't even conceive of.

[This message has been edited by Craig McPherson (edited 21 January 2001).]

[SlCKB0Y]

Thanks a lot Craig.

Being able to use my voodoo3 properly for some games, and vmware are a dig deal to me, so what i think i might do is simply reinstall. Lol

I kow this sounds like a drastic action, but from the sounds of it, it would be a big undertaking anyways. At least this way i know nothing will be broken etc etc.

Last time i reinstalled, i also made the rather large blunder of forgetting to have a seperate /var partition, so this will give me the opportunity to fix up this.

And im sure with my increased knowledge of apt, it will be a lot quicker this time around.

thanks for your help, and i hope to see everyone really soon *fingers crossed*