synaptic upgrade quit; blasted on using apt-get;upgrade; x-windows now gone
 

I installed pclinux minime on a 6 year old toshiba. It ran so well, automatically running a full upgrade that I decided to upgrade my acer aspire one netbook, which was running an full pclinuxos 2009 from about 4 months ago (beautifully!).

I tried using synaptic "mark all for upgrade" which ended with errors. (DUMB MOVE FOLLOWS -> I didn't deal with the errors)

Having seen apt-get run so smoothly on the old minime I just shot forward (into my foot!) on the netbook. Ending up with a very sick netbook that will only run single user. I can get to the network with ifup eth0, but apt-get dies immediately with a Floating point exception (core dumped) each time. I can scp files in and out, and tar in and out with the flash drive.

I even looked at the /boot and found that the mini and full versions were using the same vmlinuz with the identical checksum value.

I certainly should have been smarter than this, and I haven't looked for the bare metal save restore yet.

I have backups of /etc and /home (having put a lot of work into both)

Is there a prudent route to getting things running happily again?

Email, certificates, ssh, rsync and vpn were all so nicely but painfully configured.