On 2011-12-04 09:15-0000 Andrew Ross wrote: > Incidentally, for testing with debian unstable I'm using pbuilder. It > provides a clean chroot environment, primarily for building Debian > packages, but you can also log in to test normal compiles etc. The > big advantage over virtual machine approaches is that it is much > lighter weight and quicker. Alan, you might want to look at this too.
Hi Andrew: pbuilder (documented, by the way, at http://pbuilder.alioth.debian.org/) sounds very useful for quickly switching back and forth between various Debian platforms, but I only have time to test one Debian platform. For now that is squeeze = stable, but I plan to move to wheezy = testing in the next several months. At that time I will preview wheezy using the live CD approach. Creating such CD's should be straightforward with the live-build package. I used the live-helper ancestor of that package to help preview Debian squeeze before I installed it. That package was a bit rough around the edges, but I did get it to work, and I presume live-build implements a much smoother experience for building live CD's of Debian. The live CD idea would also allow access to multiple Debian platforms (similar to multi-booting), but obviously pbuilder would be more convenient for that purpose for those who have the time to test multiple Debian/Ubuntu platforms at once. Live CD previews of Debian and Ubuntu upgrades are especially important right now because of the continued volatility of the X stack especially for those with Intel hardware. My 4-year-old hardware has Intel g33 integrated graphics which works well with the old X stack for Debian squeeze, but I am not sure that will be the case for the new X stack for Debian wheezy because the Intel open-source graphics group stopped release testing g33 two years ago. They still claim that the new X stack _should_ work with that hardware but a certain amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about that has been introduced by their lack of release testing, and you know how paranoid I am about the completeness of release testing in any case. :-) If previewing wheezy with a live CD shows there are issues with the new X stack for Intel g33 graphics hardware, my backup plan is to buy a cheap ATI video card, but my hope is that complication will not be necessary. By the way, one of my motivations for moving to wheezy fairly soon is I am hoping that _much_ newer kernel will solve the start-up latency and associated total system slowdown that make testing PLplot on the latest wine such a major hassle for me on Debian squeeze. (My working hypothesis for the cause of these issues is the wine developers have tuned wine for modern Linux kernel capabilities that are just not as well implemented or maybe not even present for the old kernel that you get for Debian squeeze.) I am also looking forward to using the much more mature KDE-4.x desktop that is available on wheezy, later Qt4, later pango/cairo stack, etc. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
