Old mixed distro machine upgrade to stable: possible? worth it?
Hi. Haven't written to this list in a while.
Lately i got to help a friend that has been playing around with linux for a while. One of his machines has been mostly neglected on the upgrading (the well-tuned firewall made him complacent i guess), and is far behind. Initially he installed it from a Mepis CD, back when it was still based off pure debian (it's ubuntu-oriented these days), then he started adding stuff from debian till the point where it wasn't truly a mepis any longer, except with respect to X (an nvidia card with the binary driver), plus the speedtouch modem drivers he used from time to time as he played with some firewalling stuff before he switched to a dedicated firewall distro on another old machine for that. This machine wasn't ever fully upgraded to any base debian distro, but used a mix of packages, plus some unofficial repositories. Right now it still has mepis cruft, with debian stuff from woody to sarge (back when it wasn't even stable), plus the odd etch package, and some
odd software like vmware and some CVS-installed programs like the transgaming branch of Wine and the like.
Do you guys think it's worth to do a dist-upgrade to stable at this point? i'm inclined to just format it and be done with that mess, but he doesn't want to go that route since he'd have to reconfigure it all (i'd personally be willing to pay that price to be able to have the comfort of trusting the contents of the machine). Do you think it'd be good to give it a shot anyway? or would it just be a complicated way of delaying the unavoidable?
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Those unforgettable memories
for them
I live
Omoikane, Martian Successor Nadesico
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Jaime Herazo Barrios
jherazo_1999 at yahoo dot com
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