Re: Package installing / Kernel Upgrade
"Jan Albrecht" <jan_albrecht@gmx.net> writes:
> after my debian is working without problems on my firewall for a few months,
> I have two more or less simple questions:
>
> #1
> While updating or installing a package the computer needs a lot of
> time. For example updating 2 packages took about 45 minutes. Okay,
> the computer is only a P133 with 16 MB RAM, but is this a normal
> behaviour? RPM never took so long to install. Is there any way to
> speed up this process or just the normal way?
My firewall machine seems to do okay with APT and installing packages;
it's a P100 with 56 MB of RAM (recognized, there should be 64 MB but I
never bothered to find out where the last 8 MB went). It's probably
the lack of memory that's hurting you. Can you find some cheap/free
used 72-pin SIMMs for the machine?
> #2
> Is it possible to install a new kernel with "apt-get upgrade"? Or is
> the only way to upgrade the kernel to recompile a new one with the
> dpkg options?
No, and no. Generally new versions of the Linux kernel come in
differently-named packages. So 'apt-get upgrade' will see that
there's not a newer kernel-image-2.4.18-386 and not upgrade anything,
even if there is kernel-image-2.4.23-386 available. I'd normally
recommend using 'aptitude' to look through the package list ('/
kernel-image', then '\' until you find one that looks good, then '+'
and 'g' to install it). On a machine that limited, you might want to
search for packages on a separate machine, or use the lower-level
command-line APT tools.
You can also compile a kernel on a separate machine, and it will
generally work fine. I also do this with my firewall machine, since
I'd prefer the kernel compile to take less than a week. :-)
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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