I'm running Debian Sid with GDM/Gnome but for certain reasons I have been unable to upgrade my system for over a year...

Things have changed and my first attempts have failed. If I do an upgrade, things seem to go fine but when I reboot and GDM starts all of the fonts are replaced with rectangles. I can log in, but nothing appears when I type and when the Gnome gui starts, again there are no fonts.

Any thoughts on where I might start?

Thanks in advance!

The rectangles were one of the symptoms I experienced a few weeks ago. Thinking I could 'upgrade' my way past it, I then did a dist-upgrade, and this really messed things up
I posted this
and followed the suggestion to do a kernel upgrade. After the new kernel, I did a dist-upgrade and all was well.

This might not be your answer, but look into it.

I'm running a 2.6.16 kernel right now, but it would not be a problem to install a new kernel and see...

I get a totally broken system with a dist-upgrade similar to what you describe. My system goes from xfree to xorg and bunches of problems... X will not start at all, alsa is messed up... I'm hoping to just "upgrade", get things working and then "dist-upgrade".

Thanks for the idea and link.

Did you do "aptitude (apt-get) install xorg" after the dist-upgrade was done. The font-handling pieces of xorg tend to get broken during a large dist-upgrade. Usually, you should get a warning message during the dist-upgrade about that.

Actually, I just did an "apt-get upgrade" instead of "apt-get dist-upgrade" because the dist-upgrade totally wrecks the system. I don't think xorg or parts of it came in with the upgrade...

I can try your suggestion, however... I keep good backups/images so getting back to a working system is not a problem!

Thanks!

Ehh? Just a few weeks ago I was running Debian SID + Gnome + GDM and dist-upgrading daily [twice a day even, if it was possible]. I didn't have any sort of problems.

Now I gave up GNOME for FluxBox and what not, fresh install etc. but my updating habbit remain. No problems so far :-/

Seems a lot of these problems are related to the upgrade to Xorg 7, which is increasingly required by Apt installations.

Here's a good source which helped me solve my fonts issue:

http://wiki.debian.org/Xorg69To7

I followed the suggestion of purging the xfonts-base package, tweaking the font paths, and then reinstalling xfonts-base. And presto, X started. I still have some performance issues, but at least my system is workable.

It looks like a lot of people over at Ubuntu are having Xorg problems with the Edgy upgrade. Hopefully the upgrade will be smoother the next time, coz losing X is not the kind of problem newbies find fun.