(The subject change seemed appropriate...) On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 05:06:37PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 08:35:56AM -0500, Bob Tracy wrote: > > I recently > > upgraded the Alpha from etch to lenny (feedback available if anyone is > > interested) > > Yes, feedback is certainly welcome. If there are alpha-specific issues, > feel free to post this to the list. Otherwise, filing a bug report against > the upgrade-reports pseudopackage is probably best.
I have no way of knowing whether it's specific to the Alpha, so I'll simply relate my experience with the upgrade and we can decide from there. I started the upgrade process approximately two weeks ago... In a nutshell, the instructions I found for doing the dist-upgrade were (1) Edit /etc/apt/sources.list (2) Change all occurrences of "stable" to "testing". (3) apt-get update (4) apt-get dist-upgrade Step (4) successfully identified and downloaded 1.2 GB of updated packages, then bombed spectacularly during the installation of those packages. As near as I can tell, "apt-get" got extremely confused by all the interdependencies. After watching the train wreck to its conclusion (lots of error messages as apt-get's confusion increased), I found a few packages had been successfully upgraded in place. A few more were found installed, but unconfigured. Still more were in the forced-deconfigured state. I ended up spending the next several days manually installing packages with "dpkg -i", occasionally having to specify --auto-deconfigure to get past some of the more stubborn cases of multiple dependencies. Other than the sheer number of packages that were being replaced, I'll hazard a guess that another reason for the difficulty was caused by packages that were renamed between etch and lenny. Most of the problematic renamings were of the general form "packageN_x.y..." --> "package_N.m...", i.e., a major version number either became part of the package name or was removed from it. I ran into similar issues when upgrading from Sarge to Etch, and it's at least encouraging that things *can* be sorted out manually when the automatic procedures fail. At this point, "dpkg -l" produces a completely clean list of installed packages, i.e., each package line in the listing begins with "ii". Also, package updates released after I did the upgrade have installed cleanly. Separate report on the new Xorg radeon driver... There's a new feature enabled by default that attempts to use the video BIOS to determine if there's anything connected to any of the potentially multiple video outputs on the card (VGA and DVI to name two possibilities). There's no reason to expect that feature to function properly on a non-x86 platform, and in that respect, I wasn't disappointed :-). Specifying 'Option "DefaultConnectorTable" "true"' in "xorg.conf" causes the driver to assume a default video output configuration based on the detected chipset, and that got things working for me. The clue that led to trying that option? A line of output in the Xorg.0.log file where the driver indicated it was having to "guess wildly". Needless to say, it "chose poorly". -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bob Tracy | "I was a beta tester for dirt. They never did [EMAIL PROTECTED] | get all the bugs out." - Steve McGrew on /. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
