I might have people on the list who don't want to be, and I might have missed some. However, I believe you are likely to be the group most insterested.
I recently decided to upgrade my OLD Slackware print server to Debian. Next to this print server, is a "workstation" running Debian more or less set up for doing GIS work. The hardware between the two is nominally identical, save for disks and an extra TokenRing card in the workstation allowing it to be dual homed (and have Internet access). IBM 14U with PPro-200 (single). Not state of the art by any means. Anyway, I got started with this by putting images on 14 (15?) floppies (boot, root, drivers1, ... base1, base2, ...). Once that was done, I used apt-get to basically produce a nearly exact copy of all the packages on the workstation (obtained by dkpg -l). The workstation was running squid, in order to allow apt-get to get files by http. Once I had a "base system" installed, I wanted to bring the print server up to testing/unstable status (leaving the workstation at stable). apt-get install dist-upgrade worked fine for downloading files, but it couldn't handle the unpacking and configuring very well at all. The first crash occured when perl5.6 - warnings.pm could not be found in @INC. I manually installed a warnings.pm from my home system. Then it crashed looking for Exporter/Heavy.pm. I figured that perl-5.6 needed a full install at that point, so I manually did an apt-get install of all perl-5.6 modules (except for threading). That got past the perl related crashing. The install crashed on asclock-themes and eeyes trying to write graphics files that some other package had already installed. Installing these 2 packages with dpkg --force-overwrite got past that hurdle. Then, I did a series of apt-get install dist-upgrade apt-get install --fix-missing apt-get install -f dpkg --configure -a In various orders and times. Partially this was because I had compiled a custom 2.2.18pre21 kernel while this machine was still at the stable stage with the Debian package wrapper system. apt-get just couldn't get by without wanting to delete this custom kernel I had installed. One thing I want to do, is to share /usr/share between the 2 Intel machines running different versions of Debian. It is probably going to be fun. Anyway, I'm not complaining on any of this. I like Debian. I just thought the information might be useful, and since this machine isn't connected to the Internet, I manually constructed the letter. Thanks, Gord Matter Realisations http://www.materialisations.com/ Gordon Haverland, B.Sc. M.Eng. President 101 9504 182 St. NW Edmonton, AB, CA T5T 3A7 780/481-8019 ghaverla @ freenet.edmonton.ab.ca 780/993-1274 (cell)
