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 ...

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.

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.