geek

for want of a better place to put this, I feel the need to make a record of my endeavour to finally after maybe 2 years upgrade my linux distribution.

I was running the stable "potato" distribution of Debian. At least I think it was potato. Anyway, I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Bluefish, Quanta and a bunch of stuff that doesn't have up to date packages in the stable branch, so I was just forcing them in from the testing branch, and in the process I killed kdelibs4 which took quanta down with it. I decided it was time to upgrade to the testing branch.

I just followed the debian upgrade guide using dselect and while it took my a day and a night, all said and done it wasn't that hard. I first had to add testing repositories to my /etc/apt/sources.list and then run apt-get update. That was a mission actually becuase my sources list was all messed up, but I got an updated list in the end. Then just did dselect update, dselect select, dselect install. And then dselect install again... and again... and again... in the end I ran dselect install 6 times before it finally decided it was finished and offered to clean off all the .deb files. Reason being that there were some minor errors along the way. The first being that sawfish-gnome wouldn't uninstall. I had to find it's pre-remove script and comment out some guff to get rid of it. Then it was just the occasional dependency problem which all got sorted out in the end.

I then had to go back into dselect select to get back all the stuff I was using from testing, becasue for some reason it all got removed in the update process, but it was totally painless getting it all back, was I found and selected them. I found it easier to search debians packeges which tells you where the package your looking is located, like utils, graphics whatever. I few more runs of dselect install later and I was back in action. After setting everything up and being quite impressed that kde apps were back, and anti-aliased, and decided to try a reboot. (I'd been basically upgrading the entire system all day, but that's no reason to reboot linux...)

Reboot, bios check, LI...
Strange, reboot, bios, LI...
For some reason lilo had been shafted. I have windoze on a partition and linux on some others, but lilo was dead. I booted from a linux rescue disk which then booted from the hard disk automagically. I then just checked my lilo.conf file to make sure it was ok. Lilo itself had been updated in the process, so it needed to be run again to update the mbr. Ran lilo, rebooted, and all's well.

I'm now a firm proponet of dselect, which calculated all the dependencies and instead of just telling you about it goes and downloads and installs them for you. All I have to do now is geat UTF-8 working with Quanta and I'm away...