After setting the apt sources from Sarge to testing and doing multiple
upgrades and finally dist-upgrade, I have a working Distro (cron routines weather station etc
are OK) but at the GDM splash screen I get a configuration error message.
How to I check the configuration?
Base-config is not an option in etch (testing).

At the time I attempt to log on as superuser I get the following error message.
....$ su
Password:
configuration error - unknown item 'FAIL_DELAY' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'QUOTAS_ENAB' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'NOLOGIN_STR' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'ENV_HZ' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'PASS_MAX_LEN' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'CHFN_AUTH' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'CLOSE_SESSION' (notify administrator)
....#


Also I am unable to check the sources with apt-get as I get the following error message.

....# apt-get update
E: The method driver /usr/lib/apt/methods/htp could not be found.
....#

I am loathe to rebuild the system as I do have a lot of stuff on the PC I don't wish to
lose or have to reinstate.

BTW also see a UDEVD error while booting related to ;-
"hotplug events dispatcher UDEVD "failed"
not sure if this has any bearing on my troubles.

So any help to steer me in the right direction would be appreciated.

Update

Using the rescue facility on the "Testing" Network Install CD I repaired the APT package
Rebuilt the sources.list and completed a dist-upgrade.
However GDM still does not work and the same error messages appear.

Do you have Xorg installed?

What happens if you run # dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Yes Xorg is installed.
There appears to be no trouble configuring it with dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.

Further to my fiddling, I installed the KDE package set KDm as the GUI and it proceeded to load and
looked fine until I tried to activate a superuser level.
It failed with an error message relating to "waiting for gksu".
apt-get tells me the latest version of the gksu package is installed.

Conclusion:-

After many hours (days) trying to restore the GUI by reinstalling packages and attempting to use
the Rescue facility on the Installation CD, I eventually lost access to the system completly and had to reinstall.

I decided to go back to Sarge (at least it works).
Another 6 hours of relocating backups and rebuilding the system and I am almost back to normal.

I hope that when etch is finally stable I will not have the same problem as I had this time.
Certainly I will not try an upgrade next time.
It is quicker to backup all you can and do a clean install and restore from your backups.
I have also learnt that I need to document my installation steps on every application I use.

It would be nice to have had the Rescue Mode of Installation documented.
It did seem to have potential but as a newbie I was fighting in the dark a bit.