Re: upgrading and stuff
Hi Roy,
On Sat, Sep 25, 2021 at 05:07:46PM -0400, Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote:
> I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to upgrades.
> Mostly it's been a matter of running synaptic package manager from
> time to time, and that's about it. Except that lately it doesn't
> seem to be finding much of anything to do. Reading some of the
> stuff in here, I suspect that I'm horribly out of date.
> Executing "cat /etc/debian-version" returns 8.11!
So, you are still running Debian 8.x (jessie). This went end of life
for support by Debian's security team in June 2018:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases#Production_Releases
You still have more limited support by the ELTS team up until some
time in 2022, but this is of limited scope which is why you haven't
seen many updates lately.
The release of the three newer stable versions of Debian seems to
have happened without you noticing. If you remain subscribed to this
mailing list then you will surely read here about the release of
Debian 12 (bookworm), but if you want a very low traffic
announcements feed then you could subscribe to the debian-announce
list instead:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/
It's only received 6 emails so far this year:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/2021/threads.html
> consulted the release notes about how one might go about
> upgrading, and from the latest on back each one says something to
> the effect of only being able to upgrade from the last major
> version, so if there's a good way to do this whole thing at once
> I'd sure like to hear about it.
Yes, upgrades are only supported from one release to another, so if
you wish to upgrade this machine you're going to have to consult the
release notes for Debian 9 about upgrading from 8.x to 9.x, and then
the release notes for Debian 10, and so on until you are at Debian
11.x.
It's not supported to go directly from 8 to 11 (or even from 8 to
10) and trying to do so will probably end in failure.
Or you could just reinstall and then put your data files back in
place from your backups. That may be quicker.
> The only thing that works there is to log in as a regular user,
> and then use the su command to get there. A bit of a pain. Where
> in the software is this controlled? I really would like to change
> this behavior, if at all possible.
I am not aware of any modern desktop environment that allows to log
in and run the entire GUI as root, for reasons you said you didn't
want to hear about. Someone else may be able to suggest some
alternate desktop environment that allows this.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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