Successful upgrade to potato, with work...

["David E. Young" <youngde@mindspring.com>]

Greetings. The other day I posted a message decribing trouble my IPX
was having (primarily with ld.so) after an upgrade attempt from slink
to potato. After some effort, I've managed to successfully complete an
upgrade, and the machine appears to be functioning correctly. For
posterity, here is a summary of what initially failed and the steps I
took to make the upgrade successful:

Starting with a stock, "out of the box" Debian 2.1 installation from
CD ("standard" configuration, 2.0.x kernel), here is what *didn't*
work, using sound advice from the debian-user list:

  1. 'apt-get update'; 'apt-get install apt': Dependency problem
     with libc6 and the new apt version. Apt also told me I needed a
     2.2.x kernel to install the new libc6 version.

     Ok, forget upgrading apt...

  2. 'apt-get update'; 'apt-get dist-upgrade': Incompatibility between
     libc6 and the 2.0.x kernel. Ok, so I tried upgrading the kernel
     to 2.2.x. Now I encountered a circular dependency; I couldn't
     upgrade the kernel because I needed a new libc6, and I couldn't
     upgrade libc6 because I needed a 2.2.x kernel. Sigh...

  3. Reinstall Debian from CD, this time selecting the 2.2.1
     kernel. Try the upgrade again. This time it works, only something
     has gone wrong. The 'man' program produces an assertion failure
     in ld.so; so does 'umount2' during reboot. Other related errors
     while booting into runlevel 2. Removing ld.so.cache and running
     ldconfig has no effect. Also, it looks like the 2.2.15 kernel
     didn't get installed. Hmm...

     Scratch head. Sigh again.

Here is what finally worked:

  1. Reinstall Debian from CD, using the 2.2.1 kernel.

  2. Explicitly upgrade to just the 2.2.15 kernel, nothing
     else. Remote logins now fail due to insufficient PTYs. Saw this
     in the list archives, but my system didn't have
     /etc/init.d/devpts.sh (which cures the problem). So... upgraded
     the sysutils and netbase packages from potato. One of these
     contained the needed script, which solved the PTY problem. I now
     have a functioning 2.2.15 system...

  3. NOW: 'apt-get update'; 'apt-get dist-upgrade' to get potato
     installed. This *works*; no ld.so problems.

  4. Install some additional packages for nfs, telnetd. Goes fairly
     ok, but now rsh, rlogin, rlogind are missing. Sigh. Install
     rsh-client and rsh-server packages. Ok.

  5. Reboot.

  6. Up and humming.

I hope these notes prove useful to someone. Thanks to those on the
list that provided the APT steps to use when upgrading. FYI, my potato
installation is running on a SPARC IPX, 64mb ram:

dey@saipan:/etc/init.d$ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
cpu             : Fujitsu or Weitek Power-UP
fpu             : Fujitsu or Weitek on-chip FPU
promlib         : Version 2 Revision 2
prom            : 2.9
type            : sun4c
ncpus probed    : 1
ncpus active    : 1
BogoMips        : 39.83
vacsize         : 65536 bytes
vachwflush      : yes
vaclinesize     : 32 bytes
mmuctxs         : 8
mmupsegs        : 256
kernelpsegs     : 34
kfreepsegs      : 0
usedpsegs       : 53
ufreepsegs      : 132
user_taken      : 2
max_taken       : 146

Regards,

-- 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
David E. Young
Fujitsu Network Communications  "The fact that ... we still
(de.young@computer.org)          live well cannot ease the pain of
                                 feeling that we no longer live nobly."
                                  -- John Updike
"Programming should be fun,
 programs should be beautiful"
  -- P. Graham