Hi, the last thing I did was setting up some VMWare Virtual Machine and editing the Java-related symlinks - anyway,

my existing 6.06 installation appears to have been corrupted.

First, /etc/passwd was missing. I used a Knoppix Live CD in order to restore a backup of it.
Now, I'm able to login again.
In Gnome, there was an error message (in a dialog window), "HAL not available" (sorry, it's not the literal message), however, any hardware appears to work - as well as any applications work, including my /home settings.

There are some things that don't work yet:

In a terminal, the prompt appears like,
(I can still logon and become root by sudo'ing), and under System / Administration, the section "Groups and Users" is missing.

Under System / Administration, there used to be more submenus, i.e., "Services".

Also, currently, there are no system logs.

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Any ideas? - I read the Ubuntu Live CD had a Repair option, however, I think some of the missing settings are custom ones (i.e., /etc/passwd would not be repairable).

Thanks

I have no idea how you (or something you did) mess things up for you, I can't see how VMware could have or the java symlink thing but,
you could try:
also make sure you have ubuntu-desktop installed (if not then that may be part of the reason things like HAL aren't working)
as a last resort (besids backing up /home to disk/other partition and wipe the system) you could do:
to reinstall EVERYTHING you have installed.

Thank you very much binary_y2k2.
frequently outputs error messages:
This appears to be central to me.

(BTW, yesterday, before that crash, I'd issued several commands:
which might be related.)

Anyways, does anybody know which package /usr/lib/libstrstd.so belongs to, so I can fix it?

resulted in several messages stating, packages were not available for download (possibly due to the fact I'd commented out the Kubuntu repositories, but probably not) - but not leaving me with a (skip | fix) option (after those messages, the common robert@ubuntu command prompt appeared without giving me another option).

Anyways, I'd reinstalled everything using Synaptic, but the problems I'd described in my original post do persist unchanged.

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I really think that symbolic linker is broken. However, I've had reinstalled everything being covered by APT.
How comes, "/usr/lib/libstrstd.so.108" hasn't been updated by that, and how can I fix that?

- Other ideas?

I'm really appreciating any ideas!
(I'm not only doing this for fun, but also for a living, and living can be hard.)

I have looked allover the web and the only reference to libstrstd.so is the ldconfig error you have.
that file isn't part of any package in ubuntu/debian or any other distro I can find. You could just try removing it (or moving it somewhere out of /usr/lib) and try to reconfigure again, if it breaks looking for it then put it back, but if dpkg goes smooth then get rid of the file.

about the apt-get command, try it without the -m this time.

Thank you. While you'd posted, I was just working on the problem. As you suggested, I simply (re)moved libstrstd.so, and no applications complained about that (including ldconfig and dpkg).

Also, I set read permissions for everyone on the /etc/passwd file and rebooted. Everything works now. :-)

Sorry to make such a trouble while there was such a simple cause!
But it's always an extreme situation when nothing works anymore, and you're searching and searching...