upgrading and stuff
I've been running Slackware since 1999 or so, Debian somewhat less than that. I figured I'd give it a try because I was interested in handling dependencies easier (which it surely does well) and because in looking at so many distros I see a great many of them are "debian-based"...
Lots of differences! systemd instead of init, grub instead of LILO, and probably many more than I'd want to list here.
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 Reading some of the stuff in here, I suspect that I'm horribly out of date.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! And there's now apparently a version 11 out now?! I have followed the advice of some of the posts in this list and 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.
Not much special about this installation, I have done very little to it that's outside of debian packages, maybe the odd script here and there. I do see where they talk about backing stuff up. Oh yeah, and I have virtualbox running, which is where I'm typing this email, as I prefer some software's early versions, running under an older Slackware. Works for me, anyhow...
I sometimes want to log in as root. (Please don't waste your time and mine by responding about how it's not a good idea to run as root...) Very early versions of debian would list root, as well as created users, on the login screen. This one doesn't, I have to click on "not listed?" and then type in root and the root password. That works on this install, but I also have a laptop with version 10 on it (sorry, but the codenames are just not something that I find easy to deal with) and in that case this procedure doesn't work. At all. 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.
For whatever it's worth, I have no problems with a text-based login screen and then typing startx once I've logged in, which is pretty typical of my Slackware installations anyhow. The copy of Slackware that's running my server machine doesn't even have a GUI installed on it. But where would I make that change?
Any help, advice, etc. would be much appreciated.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
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Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
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