Chris Bannister wrote:
On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 07:24:40AM +0200, Daniel Ngu wrote:Hi, I read that Lenny will be released sometime in September this year. I've been using Etch and am contemplating on moving to Lenny now instead.There are some issues: First off: If you have a nvidia graphics card: The nvidia-drivers haven't migrated to testing yet so if you play tuxracer or gaze into the heavens with stellarium then you may want to wait. See: http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/169.12/README/appendix-a.html or http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-8776/README/appendix-a.html to see what driver version supports your card. The names have changed since Etch. For example, the 1.0-8776 driver was the one which supported the MX400 graphics card, but it is now the 96.43.xx driver which supports it - but is not yet in testing.
Thanks - but this is just an AMD64 LAMP server (MySQL, Perl). There is no graphic card stuff going on here.
Secondly: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=479711 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=489132 If you are ok with dealing with that then I'd say go for it.
That looks like issues with upgrades, am I right? I will be installing from scratch if I do this (I'm changing the RAID config on this machine, so it's a full re-install, which is why I'm considering doing this now).
How's usable is Lenny at the moment, in particular the Beta2 version or should I wait till later.Hey, what's this Beta2 version business. You're not referring to the Installer are you? You only need to install Debian once. To go from Etch to Lenny is a simple edit of the /etc/apt/sources.lst and then use your favourite package manager to update upgrade/dist-upgrade. If you are running Testing/Lenny then you are basically acting as a guinea pig so learn to use http://bugs.debian.org/
Agreed - although I have never used the bug reporting for debian, it would be good to know that.
I'm thinking one possible strategy for ameliorating risk here with broken packages is to also install clean Lenny on my home workstation at the same time (currently that also has Etch - I like to keep my dev workstation and the prod server in sync as much as possible, version-wise, so testing code is a bit more valid). So if I always make sure to first do apt-get upgrade at home, to see if anything is fundamentally broken, I should be able to avoid most of any really big blow-ups in Lenny. The only real difference between dev and prod here is that dev is i386 and prod is AMD64.
I've been running Lenny on my Eee PC 8G for the last couple of months, and didn't have any problems at all. Lots of updates, of course, but nothing seemed to break.
Does anybody have a handle on how much better MySQL and Perl versions are going from Etch to Lenny? MySQL on Etch has occasionally gone into a tailspin, presumably with a bad query that makes it eat CPU until I kill it. Impossible to tell what the query was, since it only gets logged after completion (and never completes). I'm also hoping the new version in Lenny maybe has some bug fixes in there. And Perl 5.10 - if I'm doing a clean install, not upgrade, any big gotchas in there with existing code? I guess MySQL and Perl are the two really big ones. I currently roll my own Apache 1.3 from source (eventually I'll learn about Apache 2 and upgrade my code).
Thanks again for the tips. Currently I'm inclined to just try this - first on the home workstation, of course, then on the server if everything appears to be working on dev.
Neil