Re: questions for when Etch goes stable
hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
Also, I have found the sarge to etch upgrade to be brutal. The
systems I have tried to upgrade recently are all in shambles. The
particular problem I've encountered seems to be the Xfree86 -> xorg 7
transition. It's a real trick to get it to upgrade, especially if there
are any non-Debian packages on the system, and even after upgrade, I
haven't got X into a reliable working state. Crash on boot is more like
it. I'm still upgrading and reconfiguring moderately regularly, in the
hope something starts to work soon. It has before. If you are on
adial-up, I hope you have a package caceh somewhere so you won't have to
repeatedly download the same packages as you try different approaches.
Maybe my method really did save me time, effort, and stress, then. Of
course, it required time and disk space. I only had about half of my
disk partitioned (with lvm), with plenty of empty space in the used
partitions. So I created a second set of equally sized lvm partitions
and mounted them in a chroot and used debootstrap to create a minimal
Etch system. I then used dpkg -l to get a list of installed packages on
Sarge and printed it out. I went through this list and weeded out
anything that I no longer use, or need. I then deleted the libraries
from the list, as well. This left me with a list of what I needed to
have on the Etch partitions and I installed them using aptitude. I
still had my Sarge system usable and could simply reboot into Etch every
now and then to test programs and configurations.
By now it seems to have everything working without having to worry about
the XFree86 to Xorg conversion, or the udev conversion. This also got
rid of all the cruft that has been accumulating over the last seven or
eight years as this hard disk has moved through several different boxen,
which was my primary reason for doing the conversion this way.
--
Marc Shapiro
mshapiro_42@yahoo.com
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