readre wrote:Hi,
I may have accidentally uninstalled everything on my Debian (dual boot, currently writing this from the Windows partition).
I have to be blunt here. It probably was not intentional on your part but lacking knowledge before taking action is no excuse, especially with ignorance and no research done about it. If you browsed this forum, you would've seen plenty of sob stories on how upgrading glibc destroyed their valued systems.
readre wrote:So this happened:
I really needed glibc version 2.15 for a specific program (and as you know, Debian stable only has up to 2.13), so I followed this guide (
http://stackoverflow.com/a/19671443) to make it work. In other words, I:
- stopped the gui
- added sid to /etc/init.d/sources.list
- apt-get update
- and then this command: apt-get -t sid install libc6-amd64 libc6-dev libc6-dbg
It took a while, so I left my computer (and didn't see what it was doing). When I came back and it had finished, I removed the sid line from /etc/init.d/sources.list and rebooted.
It rebooted without the graphical user interface, in pure commandline mode. All my files seem to be intact, but I can't run any program, they're simply not installed. I *can* install programs, but most of the times I lack a number of other uninstalled dependencies. In short, it seems like everything has been uninstalled.
Never trust these guides, they are written by imbeciles and obviously never understood how Debian works. Also NEVER change anything you do not fully understand.
readre wrote:I have no idea how this could have happened from the above update.
Because you did no research on the results that would follow. The number 1 rule of Linux (or all OS's even) is never touch or change anything when you do not know the consequences! Because this happens.
Your system is now in a state where it
could be fixable. But it would take a lot of time and tedious work to get it back to the way it was (unless you backed up your entire root drive with clonezilla or dd). The quickest and easiest way of resolving this issue is to reinstall Debian and promise yourself and your system that you will never touch the sources.list again until you understand how it and Debian works.
If you want a more up to date glibc then I would recommend waiting for Debian testing to turn stable or use a different distribution like Ubuntu/ Mint/ openSUSE or Fedora.
readre wrote:Is there any way to get back to how it was?
See above
readre wrote:how do I even go from here to reinstall everything?
Thanks!
Install Debian like you have done before and overwrite the root partition with the installer, if you created a separate home partition you will not need to touch it.