I had a mildly exasperating day with my esteemed Debian. I brag a lot on these forums about the ease of installing Debian Testing, and thought I should report what I think is their problem at some level ... not mine. This all happened on my AMD64, with the AMD64 OS.

Briefly, I read here somewhere that running a mixed Etch/Sid system, I should install apt-listbugs to get a warning is I was installing something that might break the system. So I did. (I'm not sure this had anything to do with my problem, but am reporting it for completeness.) I normally do a weekly dist-upgrade, and today was my first try with list-bug. It told me that 3 or 4 programs had serious bugs reports open, and one of the options was to pin those apps. That's what I did. It also said I had to restart apt for the pin to take effect. I'm cooperative.

When I restarted the apt-get dist-upgrade, it announced it was going to remove a lot of stuff. I hesitated over that, but decided that, if neccessary, I could get it all back with yet another dist-upgrade. I deleted basically everything related to x-windows, ... xorg, desktops, the works ... and I could not get it to reinstall. I had a cli, and after fighting with it a while, I decided to just copy off my data files and reinstall.

I got a fresh beta2 netinstal cd from Debian and ran it thru, selecting a desktop 'task' at the end of the basic install ... It would not install any gnome or kde. Xorg was fine, but no desktop. Decided to try it again with a 'daily' install cd ... Same thing. ... Messed around some more, managed to get x-windows-system and gdm installed, but no gnome-desktop-environment.

Finally decided to try getting it from Sid ... zoom! ... no problem. Also installed kde from there, and eventually decided to just do a complete dist-upgrade. No problems. Now I guess I'll change my sources.list back to 'testing,' and wait for it to catch up. Don't really have a problem at this point. I'm almost back to normal, but the whole experience was (is) rather troubling.

I installed using the amd testing installer last week. I had the same problem. Kde is not complete in testing. I had to add SID to get it as well. I usually run on Sid anyways.