sid misadventures
I had installed sid three times in all. The first was the most successful
and longest lasting in which I had a few weeks to learn vbnc and use it a
little. I did all of that since we're changing over to visual studio 2008
at work and I had been without projects for several years on the job and
figured this might possibly change some things. The next two installations
of sid happened with kernel upgrades. The second specifically offered a
kernel upgrade and speakup upgrade and those two had a conflict so speakup
was removed. When that happens without a backup accessibility system,
it's time to reinstall Linux. The third installation of sid provided a
different problem. This one happened with dpkg --configure -a but that
only happened after a very slow boot up and the system running out of
memory several thousand times and throwing errors. This happens on an amd
with a gig of memory though I did use the speakup i486 kernel for that
install (so much for conservatively). Additionally on boot up snd-seq
module would not build correctly so that crashed. So I get root access
and try running dpkg --configure -a and get the same snd-seq failure and
dpkg --configure -a hangs there for several hours. End result, reinstall
debian lenny. I may check backports.org archive for vbnc and see if that
install will work. In all, it's been interesting. Fortunately this is
not a production system.
After all of that though I figure maybe put something I figured out that
worked nicely as a result of these misadventures. Debian being the way it
is only installs necessary packages and not all available packages. Over
time I have found certain additional packages I use and like to have on
the system. So I figured this time to make me two files. One with a
space separated database of additional packages with lines no longer than
60 characters done easily with fmt -w60 < root.1 >root.2; mv root.2
root.1. Next cp root.1 root.log. Then edit root.log with ex. Put a bash
top line on it #!/bin/bash at top of file. Next 2,$s/^/aptitude -y
install / and save the file. Next chmod 755 root.log in root directory
then run that sucker. There is one caution about such a script I'll leave
you with. Put nothing in root.1 until you've installed it successfully on
your system! That way you only have installation questions to answer from
inside package configurations and don't have to clean up any messes. The
reason for line width of 60 is that all lines will be no wider than 80
once the aptitude prefix is added and I don't want to listen to scrolling
lines since you can't be sure spaces don't separate last files on scrolled
lines with first files on wrapped lines. Additional packages installation
that took most of a week with this script and database took less than an
hour once it was working. Use debian for long enough and you figure these
things out. Use this install method if you like and hopefully it will
make life better for you too.
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