I accidently uninstalled (apt-get purge) lots of important system stuff, including gnome dekstop and whatever-is-responsible-for-internet-connetion, among other things. Is there any way to repair it? Without complete reinstall?
I can access it via command line (terminal) more or less normally. move, copy files, etc., just no apt-get install due to no internet connection. So I guess repairing internet would be first priority… Any way to check why it doesnt work and what needs to be done?
I do have LiveCD I can boot from. So I can manually copy neccessary files from it, if any.
Thanks in advance for your help
Edit: after I boot from my LiveCD I can use internet, however, as soon as I chroot into real filesystem, I cannot use internet from there. Guess it’s how expected to work…
Edit 2: how I fixed it: with the help of people here, I finally did it. I booted from liveCD, copied /etc/resolv.conf to real installation, chrooted there, apt-get install ubuntu-desktop. While installation failed due to many errors, files got downloaded into real installation nevertheless. So I rebooted machine from live cd into real ubuntu, and this time while I still had no internet, apt-get had ubuntu-desktop cached. So I installed ubuntu-desktop and rebooted with GUI this time. After some minor manual fixes (ifupdown managed) I got wireless working too, now it’s only a matter of auto-updates etc., with synaptic. Phew…. thanks again everybody 🙂 Special thanks to ~quack who didnt provide any “formal” answer I could formally accept, but was the most helpfull with comments 🙂
Solution:
if you can run the ifconfig utility (as root), and have a single ethernet adapter which can use DHCP to access the network:
sudo ifconfig eth0 upsudo dhclient eth0 &That should activate your first ethernet adapter and run dhclient to get it an address via DHCP. Â If that works successfully, you might be able to do repair your installation by running:
sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktopThat command will install the packages which are included in a base Ubuntu install. (you can substitute “kubuntu-desktop” if you use KDE or “xubuntu-desktop” if you use XFCE.
If you cannot get networking at all, the best bet is as Justin suggested above, use apt-cdrom to install the ubuntu-desktop package from your CD.
