I dist-upgraded my laptop last evening and wvdial stopped working. This afternoon I dist-upgraded my desktop and the same happened. I found a few bug reports online with the same error but no solution. It gives the following in the log:

wvdial: utils/wvtask.cc:409: static void WvTaskMan::_stackmaster(): Assertion `magic_number == -0x123678' failed.

How do I fix this? I have no internet connection on my home computers for now.

When I had antiX 8.5, I only did upgrades but now I have done dist-upgrades. It seems with dist-upgrades there's an awful lot to download very often and that's not good on dialup. The problem with upgrades only was that browsers and so on used very old versions only and couldn't upgrade. The features and all were ok, but what about browser security? However, the older installation of antiX never broke when I did an upgrade. What should I do to have a stable, working computer? Only upgrade or what?

Found out that downgrading libwvstreams to 4.6.1-3 solves this. Those packages were still in apt/archives, so wvdial works again.

I'd appreciate your opinion what to do about the upgrades?

pasuuna, indeed a dilemma.

For dial up users, maybe the best bet is to only upgrade the apps you want/need upgrading or switch the repos to use stable only.

Now that I've downgraded libwvstreams, how do I stop it from being upgraded again at next upgrade?

pasuuna wrote:Now that I've downgraded libwvstreams, how do I stop it from being upgraded again at next upgrade?

In root terminal: Excellent apt tutorial here, although when I just checked they (aptosid) seemed to be having some trouble with the manual links:

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://aptosid.com/manual/en/welcome-en.htm"
linktext was:"http://aptosid.com/manual/en/welcome-en.htm"
====================================

If you use synaptic to upgrade then make sure you pin libwvstreams there also.
Package>Lock Version

Thank you!