About a month ago I de­cid­ed not to try to mi­grate from libc++5 to libc++6 my­self, but wait for the up­com­ing up­grade of De­bian that would pro­vide this in an easy pack­age. So when the up­grade was there I couldn't wait and just ran apt-get up­date && apt-get dist-up­grade... That kin­da blew up in my face. Be­ing re­mote and re­boot­ing made me loose the box. When I got home it turned out a pack­age to load ker­nel mod­ules was re­moved and the net­work dri­vers wouldn't get loaded any­more, and about any mod­ule need­ed to get that mod­ule back on that box couldn't be loaded ei­ther...

Well, they don't call 'em res­cue discs for noth­ing! Popped my LordSutch ISOLINUX CD in the dri­ve, boot­ed with the root filesys­tem ar­gu­ment and us­ing this 2.4 ker­nel with the crip­pled 3.1 De­bian in­stal­la­tion re­pair­ing the dam­age was easy. And not much lat­er I could re­boot into ker­nel 2.6.11.11 and the De­bian 3.1 set­up. So, would this qual­i­fy as Se­ri­ous break­age? Well, re­mote­ly just run­ning apt with­out read­ing the doc­u­men­ta­tion, I was ask­ing for it (The lap­top I up­grad­ed fol­low­ing the steps in the docs didn't have this trou­ble). And if I didn't want these kind of things to hap­pen I'd be us­ing Win­dows, OS X or RedHat. I like the chal­lange, and I won't rec­om­mend run­ning Lin­ux to some­one who doesn't have an­oth­er ma­chine around to find out how to bring a dead one back up.

And the bttv is also do­ing it again.