[NBLUG/talk] Debian upgrade

William Tracy afishionado at gmail.com
Tue Mar 21 16:46:07 PST 2006


Well, yesterday I had a close call with Debian. Debian has one
drawback: It's like having a bomb in the middle of your house with a
big red button on the side labeled "apt-get dist-upgrade". ;-)

I wanted to get my hands on OOo 2 and a reasonably recent build of
Wine; it looked like the only reasonable way to get Debian packages
for both was to upgrade to Etch and upgrade libc. I made the requisite
changes to sources.list on my laptop and started the slow process of
running apt-get dist-upgrade over my dialup connection.

I need to back up here a moment. My friend and I have entered the MESA
Lego robotics challenge at the SRJC; he's building the Lego robots,
and I'm using BrickOS to program them from the laptop in question.

Yesterday I went to his house to work on the robots, and found that
the device I need to upload software to the robot had stopped working.
I guessed that this was related to the half-completed upgrade, so I
connected to his cable internet connection, and finished the upgrade.

As luck would have it, x-server-common was unable to install. (I'm
retyping this from memory, so probably some of the details here are
not perfect.) It was unable to overwrite /etc/x11/Xsession. So, I
brilliantly switched to console 1 and ran /etc/init.d/kdm stop.
apt-get was still unable to overwrite /etc/x11/Xsession. Running out
of ideas, I started KDM again.

The X server didn't start.

The Legos were working fine now, though :-) but I had no desktop. Oops.

Since apt-get couldn't manually overwrite the file, I finally decided
to manually remove it. rm announced that the file in question didn't
exist.

The plot thickened. Curious, I tried touching the file. apt-get give
the same error--with a *different* file name. Three touches later, and
all packages related to X were installed. I restarted KDM, and all was
well.

All in all, the upgrade was as seamless as anyone would have a right
to expect, given that I upgraded *everything* installed on the box.
Still, it's a reminder that upgrading a Debian box *can* break things.

The new system is neat. I'm enjoying lots of the new shiny things in
KDE, and they've finally gotten Firefox to understand KDE session
management. I'm a little annoyed at how aggressively the new KDE tries
to copy Windows, and how much OOo tries to look like Office XP. *sigh*

Ooh, I've even got X.org now (finally!). :-)

So, Debian still rocks. ;-) Although, I'm starting to see that the
Gentoo folks do have a point--you don't have to upgrade libc just to
install a new version of one little package.

And now, something completely unrelated. :-) Apparently it's kosher to
post job offers on the list here, but is it alright to post resumes
here? I'm a CIS major looking for an internship this summer. If anyone
is interesting in seeing what I can do, I've contributed some chunks
of code to a few Open Source projects, and that code is all online.

Thanks,
William Tracy



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