The story so far: - Accidentally nuke shared libraries; system dies - Unpack base2_1.tgz off original Debian 2.1 install CD; manually copy in enough of this and the rescue disk to get it to boot again - dpkg -i everything in dists/stable/main/binary-i386/base - Fire up dselect and reinstall everything from CD
Now it pretty much works again but I have a weird problem with su. I can log in either as root or as pigeon without problems. If I log in as pigeon, and su root, and enter the root password in response to the Password prompt, I get "incorrect password". If, however, I enter _no_ password, I get: : command not found ' is not an octal number from 000 to 777 : command not found : command not found and a somewhat mangled prompt; then whoami root - so I've su'ed to root without entering a password. WHAT? Wondering about the mangled prompt, I did echo $PS1 | hexdump and got: 68 5c 5c 3a 5c 77 20 24 0a 0d ^^^^^ So I've got some MS-DOS format file with carriage returns in it. I suspect the ": command not found" is for the same reason. I think this has come from the install CD (2.1) as that has some files with MS-DOS CRs in. Trouble is, I've no idea which one (and there are a lot of files on the install CD!), or if this is related to the no-password problem - which is the more severe problem, I have NO intention of connecting to the internet unless this is solved. Any ideas? Pigeon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]