Did an upgrade and things got hung up during the upgrade. Some dependencies were broken I believe.

I rebooted the system and after some attempts at getting into grub during the boot process, I finally got command-line access.

I attempted to run startx and got the following error:

user/bin/startx line 139 cannot create temp file for here document: Read only.

xauth; error in lock authority file /home/Jon/.Xauthority

user/bin/startx: line 151; cannot create temp file for here document: Read only.

X; warning; process set to priority -1 instead of priority 0

Fatal sever error; could not create lock file in tmp/.tX0-lock

xinit; connection refused (error 111); unable to connect to X server.

Xinit: no such process (erro3); sever error

XAuth; error in locking authority file /home/Jon/X.Authority


I tried "sudo dpkg -- configure -a" but it wouldn't execute.


Any ideas how to recover from something like this? If I have to reinstall so be it... but I'd rather NOT!

What error message did it give you?

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Steve Stites

jailbait,

error message returned:

dpkg: unable to access dpkg status area: read-only file system.

Any idea what this means?

When you were having troubles booting you eventually got to a command line where you were running in recovery mode. The recovery mode mounts all of your filesystems as read only which means that you cannot update files.

What I would try next is to boot your Ubuntu install CD into rescue mode, mount your Ubuntu / partition as read/write if rescue mode has not already done so, and chroot to your Ubuntu / partition.

At that point you will be running as root and you can try:

dpkg -- configure -a

If that doesn't work then you will probably have to reinstall.

----------------
Steve Stites

I end up at command line.

last entry is :

Busy Box v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3 -5 ubuntu12) Built in shell (ash) enter help for list of commands

(initramfs) _

fell back to using ver 7.10 choice in grub

the other vers are broken

AMD x2 (socket am2)runing at 1.78 Ghz
ABIT AN 52 (Nvidia chipset)
Nvidia FX5700
2 Gb ram
120 Gb SATA drive

I seen another similar post, but I dont get the same error.
I used the online upgrade, no cd was used
I have not tried the recovery mode as I do not know where to start

warpuck,

You should ask your question as a new thread. Putting your question at the end of a stale thread like this means that probably Spearhead40 and I are the only people who will see the question.

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Steve Stites