Comment 2 for bug 438823

I will try the apport-collect command as described above.

However:

1. The failure to build Xalan (see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1275346 for details) is a show-stopper. I suspect it's because the Debian shell suddenly and (seemingly randomly) deletes environment variables from being passed to subshells, which then breaks the Xalan and Xerces builds. A good friend suggested this, and my subsequent analysis seemed to verify it.

2. I've stopped applying updates because of the failure to boot after one of the updates had forced me to select an older kernel. At this time, my reliably booting older kernel and previously-built-but-cannot-be-rebuilt Xerces and Xalan libraries mean that I am frozen in time on this 8.04 distro.

3. Before I upgrade my (otherwise working well enough, even if not perfectly) machine and find that I am dead in the water (if I can't build Xalan or Xerces I would truly be dead in the water), I need to find another machine to use for upgrade / migration experiments.

I do thank everyone for their support, and I continue to favor Ubuntu, largely because of the dedication of the Cannonical team and of the user community. And it's not anyone's fault here that I cannot obtain access to a second machine to test an upgraded build environment. But if someone could shed some light on my item (1) above (missing env vars in subshells), I would feel a lot safer with an installation of the latest Ubuntu on this machine.