Over to testing!

[hazel]

After a traumatic upgrade from Etch to Lenny, I swore that the next Debian upgrade would be the last. So today I upgraded, not to Squeeze as such, but to testing. Rolling release from now on!

As I expected, it was hell. Lots of stuff got wiped - even xinit! It took me most of the afternoon to get my desktop back. Synaptic had disappeared too; when I reinstalled it, it brought all kinds of gnome rubbish with it, but I put up with that. After all, Debian is my secondary system now; if I want simplicity, there's always Crux.

Synaptic shows over 300 packages still to upgrade - and that was in spite of running "aptitude full-upgrade". I'll clear them gradually. At the moment I'm concentrating on basic utilities and apps that I actually use a lot. I've only just got Kazehakase working again.

Never again!

[Rubberman]

Hazel, you know that old adage - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Before I do the "forklift upgrade" on my operating systems I try to run the new version in a virtual machine first, just to learn what is what. In fact, if I am going to do such an upgrade, I'll first install my current OS in a VM, get it working as I want/do now, and then do the upgrade to see what breaks. Taking a snapshot of the original OS before the upgrade, I can easily revert and try again if necessarily. At the least, even if I am not testing in the VM first, I'll make a full copy of my system disc to an external drive and then if the upgrade breaks everything and I decide to wait some time before I do it, I can revert to my known-good-system by writing the external copy back to the system disc. I've done that successfully in the past. It helps reduce those "Oh sh!t" moments...

[hazel]

Hazel, you know that old adage - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Before I do the "forklift upgrade" on my operating systems I try to run the new version in a virtual machine first, just to learn what is what. In fact, if I am going to do such an upgrade, I'll first install my current OS in a VM, get it working as I want/do now, and then do the upgrade to see what breaks. Taking a snapshot of the original OS before the upgrade, I can easily revert and try again if necessarily.

Well, I don't have a virtual machine environment. I believe you need much more advanced hardware than mine to run such a system. And the reason I wanted to upgrade now is that testing/Squeeze is frozen at the moment, which gives me a good time window to get the update and all its consequences over with. Anyway, it's not really "Oh ****!!" in my case because I've always got Crux to do corrections out of.

[hazel]

Update: OK, I was in a bad mood when I made the original post. I always am after a big upgrade. But this time it actually went much better than before because I knew what to avoid. For example, I exported my family database in two different formats because I know that gramps updates are never compatible with the old databases. Last time I lost all my data and had to mess about for weeks with Berkeley utilities to get it back; this time I just scrubbed the whole thing and reimported it. And I listed on paper any packages that aptitude insisted on scrubbing and that I knew I wanted to keep (xinit, sudo, synaptic...) so that I could easily reinstall them.

I spent most of Friday evening upgrading everything that I know I use or that I consider "core". I plan to be more selective on the remaining upgrades. This is a wonderful opportunity to purge my system of unneeded packages, so I'm using synaptic to climb up and down dependency trees and lop off unwanted twigs.

There's still some incompatibilities in config files but nothing I can't fix.

[rokytnji]

This is a wonderful opportunity to purge my system of unneeded packages, so I'm using synaptic to climb up and down dependency trees and lop off unwanted twigs.

Not sure if you are aware of this command. I use it regularly to trim the fat on my 4 gig root fie system install of my Asus EEEPC 900. I've kept my install down to 2 gigs and I have a ton of stuff on it (skype,gimp big stuuf like that.

Try it out if you like or just ingnore me hazel. I know how nervous one can be when upgrading a install. Heck. I do a apt-get dist-upgrade about every 2 weeks running a

System: Host antiX1 Kernel 2.6.35-3.dmz.1-liquorix-686 i686 (32 bit) Distro antiX-M8.5-686-update 27 July 2010

Ok. The command I use to trim the fat is (won't work on installed packages though. So hunt and peck for dependencies in Synaptic for installed packages I don't know)

deborphan | xargs apt-get -y remove

Happy Trails, Rok

[hazel]

deborphan | xargs apt-get -y remove

Thanks for reminding me about deborphan. It's one of the things I need to reinstall (it disappeared along with synaptic when I upgraded aptitude). But I would never pipe an output into any kind of remove command, whether it was apt-get remove or rm. The very thought makes my blood run cold! No, slow and steady does it every time for me.