Re: stable-->unstable (or how far to throw the disks?)
At 09:48 PM 02/20/02 -0800, Osamu Aoki wrote:
>There will be "incident" if you upgrade many times. That is why it is
>called "testing", or "unstable". "incident" can be dealt with minimum
>trouble if you know how.
>
> http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/quick-reference/
I've read that. Nice work, thanks! It's helpful, but I need to read it
again.
>> I've installed about six times over the last week. Starting with
>> Potato CDs, and for about the last three times using floppies. Mostly
>> I'm repeating the installation because I ran out of salt to rub in my
>> cuts.
>
>Sounds like you may have a bad CD and creating FD from CD.
No, I'm creating using dd on another linux machine to write the images to
floppy, and then using cmp to check them.
>
>> I managed to get good diskettes for all except driver-4.
>
>Use IDEPCI image. You may not even use driver disks. :)
Yes, I wondered. Any idea of a rtl8139 network driver is in that image?
>Before installing, you can go to console by pressing ALT-F2. Then use
>editor to edit /etc/sources.list. You can skip most minimum potato
>install downloads. That is a small trick.
Edit it how? You mean add the testing URLs? I did that, but again, I
found it more reliable to do a complete upgrade for each step. Believe me,
I've been looking for all the short cuts I can find! ;)
>You can unselect it by pressing "_" for large package such as tetex and
>emacs. dselect autoselect basic packages.
Yes, those were the killers.
>> It's not a smooth process. For example, I'm mounting to /home
>> /dev/hda3 an existing partition. Using the driver disks Potato
>> doesn't umount my that partition on first reboot, so I have to wait
>> while 60GB is checked. Not to mention how much time it all takes.
>
>Why mount? You can manually umount it. fstab just needed to be
>edited.
Right, but I wonder if that's an error in the config scripts. I Activated
an Existing Partition via the menu, but when it rebooted it hadn't been
umonuted. So maybe it forgot it had mounted it in the first place??
>Put them all in /var/cache/apt/archives/ then you are all set,
>I think. Try it and tell me what happens.
I did that. I did two installs today. The first time I tried to be tricky:
- booted with rescue and root floppies.
- Alt-F2 and insmod my network card module from floppy
- did base install off the debian site
- copied .deb files to the /var/cache/apt/archives directory (from
a second partition)
- then cycled through apt-get update & apt-get dist-upgrade.
And indeed, it seemed like the .deb files were being used. But the upgrade
failed badly and let the machine in an unstable state.
So I started all over again, using the driver-? disks, and dselect instead
and it went smooth. I still copied the .deb files back into the cache, but
it didn't seem to install much faster -- still fetched most packages from
the debian mirror. (I thought dselect was just a front-end for apt-get, so
I wouldn't have thought there would be a difference in the use of cached
.deb files.)
Anyway, I've decided to move to a new headache: trying to get XFree86
working. I'm using 4.1, but still a 2.2.19 kernel. I need to figure out
how to move down to 1024x768 and how to keep the mouse from hanging...
What fun.
I've got a "Micron" 19" 900LX display. Anyone know the available config
settings?
--
Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley@hank.org
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