LQboy

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Hi everyone,

Last week I got a severe error during my system startup. My system started booting normally until it began writing down a bunch of exim scripts (I think) on my screen and locked. I am not able to login, change virtual screens or the like. I tried ctrl + Z, ctrl + X, ctrl + C but no good. Nothing got me to the login screen! Thus I am now unable to use my debian system.

I am using debian SID, no pinning, and the problem occured after I did apt-get update & apt-get upgrade & apt-get dist-upgrade. I remember that it did update some exim packages. I actually do not use exim, but the debian installer installs it by default. I use yahoo, gmail for mail.

Since I cannot login to my system, I beleive I have to repair it via knoppix, puppy linux, dam small linux or the like. But I don't know what to repair. As far as I know, the debian system needs an mailing system to at least send admin messages to users and admins. Thats why its installed by default.

I am using kernel 2.6 - k7, and I haven't installed any packages outside the official debian SID repository. Can anyone help me? I stuck with windows. What can I do to fix this problem and get my system to operate properly again?

Thank You in advance ...

Dead Parrot

If you can mount your Debian partition from Knoppix or some other live-CD, you can rename /etc/rc2.d/S20exim4 to K20exim4 and do the same in /etc/rc3.d/ . That should prevent Exim from starting during the boot-time.

There's no real harm done if you keep exim disabled. Normal users (who use an external e-mail service like gmail) don't have much use for exim.

If you run Debian Unstable, then you should install the apt-listbugs utility that will warn you before you install any packages with known bugs.

LQboy

Worked fine. Thank you very much. Is this like renaming so it won't boot. I looked at rc4.d and saw that there were a bunch of files starting with "K". Are these like backup copies.