Hi There...

I installed Red Hat Fedora Core 3, and I was having some problems with it, so I bought the Linuxant HSF Modem driver, and then downloaded apt and synaptic. So far so good.

Synaptic really does work well, and I upgraded a whole whack-load of stuff.

The problem is, after the last bunch of installs, the machine is lacking functionality. I must have put something on there that didn't agree with everything, but the problem I'm currently facing is that I can't remember what I selected!

Is there any way to ask synaptic/apt to show me the history of what they installed? I'd even be willing to run a shell script, just so I can know what I installed that royally screwed up my machine.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

More info for all you cats out there...

I was very successful using Synaptic for most of the day yesterday. It was just the last batch of "new stuff" that killed me.

All other installs prior to the last went off without a hitch. Then, I did a "big batch" of upgrades and new installs, and while it looked like everything was fine (nice not having to reboot when you upgrade your machine), and I was able to use my new HSF modem driver just fine, I assumed all was good.

Then I took my machine home. All of a sudden, I didn't have audio (at all), and my HSF modem driver was saying it wasn't being initialized. I also couldn't plug my USB key in and see it. Oh, it was plugged in right... it's just that whatever I had done messed up the system's ability to mount it correctly. Very frustrating.

Luckily, I have learned the magic of Linux, and that's Grub2, which allows you to run multiple kernels. The previous kernel (stock RHFC3) seems to work OK with HSF, audio and USB, so I'll try to make everything worse by doing a system update. This should be fun!

It's just a good thing this is a test install (for now...)!

Quatmosk