Bug#609566: upgrade-reports: Lenny>Squeeze upgrade not quite there yet
Package: upgrade-reports
Severity: important
Deciding it was time, I upgraded my old Lenny system to Squeeze. I followed
the multi-step instructions (upgrade, install new kernel, install new udev,
dist-upgrade. Or so I thought. The upgrade seemed to go well enough, as did
the kernel and udev steps.
The dist-upgrade failed:
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem
Errors were encountered while processing:
vde2
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
That left ~255 old packages undeleted. It took a while, but I think I finally
got the mess cleaned up, re-ran dist-upgrade, then continued cleaning up.
Bits of KDE 3.5 weren't deleted, bits of KDE 4 weren't installed, and it took
days to get the user side of KDE to a point where it is marginally usable
again. But this is all par for the course so far; the upgrade isn't a finished
product yet.
I do have some observations.
1) If my IDE ZIP drive is plugged in, it is detected as /dev/sda; my first SATA
drive is then detected as /dev/sdb. The system panics because it cannot find
its partitions. For the time being, I've unplugged the ZIP drive. I've not
tried booting with USB drives plugged in. either udev did not upgrade properly,
or the rules need stweaking.
2) Using X and KDE, 'transient' windows will randomly leave their images
behind, as though X's backing store isn't working right. Forcing a redraw
usually cures the problem. I've no clue where this problem might be (fbdev?).
3) I've been using my KDE user environment since Etch. It's definitely time
to dump it and start anew; I'll do that once I figure out how to save kmail
settings and konqueror bookmarks and akregator histories. It's gotten to
where konqueror is simply unusable: most ajax sites still don't work, the
location bar rarely displays correctly (if at all), and editting toolbars
and some settings usually results in a crash. Oh, and rendering HTML like
<scan style="size:50%">Some text<img src={smilie}></span>
as xhtml transient (replace {smilie} with an URL to a smilie image a little
larger than the text) causes konqueror 3.5.10 to display an extraneous
scrollbar and crash, and causes konqueror 4.4.5 to just display an
extraneous scroll bar. Move the image outside the span and all is well.
4) Evolution text drag-n-drop using the mouse doesn't work at all, and
drag-selection using the keyboard has very limited functionality.
It may be that upgrades just won't work very well on systems with 8 years
of user cruft built up. For example, I think I was well into Lenny before
I discovered the cause of a certain filesystem problem causing crashes and
hangs: the ReiserFS 3.6 driver worked well with a 3.5 disk structure until
file sizes exceeded 2GB. But as often as that happened, I never lost data,
even when I had to rebuild the filesystem.
If my opinion counted for anything, I'd say Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade for
user systems isn't yet ready.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686-bigmem (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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