Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
On Sun, Dec 26, 1999 at 11:00:52PM -, Pollywog wrote: I am running potato on my other machine, but I want to upgrade my laptop from Slink to Potato. If I understand correctly, you had to install a whole new Potato system from scratch. That is exactly what I want to avoid; I want to upgrade the system I have now. No, no reinstall should be required - for me, one of the great things about Debian is that it supports in-place upgrades on running systems (you don't have to boot an installer or anything). Just pointing apt or dselect at a source of potato packages and upgrading should DTRT. I don't think there's any major breakage in potato right now. -- Mark Brown mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Trying to avoid grumpiness) http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/ EUFShttp://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/ pgpr3bi4Rkytg.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
On 27-Dec-1999 Mark Brown wrote: No, no reinstall should be required - for me, one of the great things about Debian is that it supports in-place upgrades on running systems (you don't have to boot an installer or anything). Just pointing apt or dselect at a source of potato packages and upgrading should DTRT. I don't think there's any major breakage in potato right now. It is just one of my machines that was broken, but I am installing potato now. I hit a snag, but if I can set up an apt.conf file, I might be able to fix the problem. -- Andrew
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
Pollywog [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am running potato on my other machine, but I want to upgrade my laptop from Slink to Potato. If I understand correctly, you had to install a whole new Potato system from scratch. That is exactly what I want to avoid; I want to upgrade the system I have now. I did the upgrade some time ago. If I remember rightly I upgraded to the 2.2.x kernel first and made the recommended upgrades to other parts of the system. I then had a Slink system running 2.2.x. I then used apt-get to install a package I knew needed libc6 2.1 which got my Slink box to the libc6 2.1 level. Everything appeared to work correctly, so a few days later I did apt-get dist-upgrade and got a smooth upgrade to Potato, where I am now. The step-by-step approach worked well for me. I do a weekly apt-get upgrade (using unstable, of course) to keep my system current and have rarely had a problem. A few minor things which have been reported in this list, but nothing as major as my system refusing to boot into Linux, or X not running etc.. -- Phillip Deackes Debian Linux (Potato)
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
One apparrent success: apt-get dist-upgrade slink - potato on an old ast laptop. The kernel is actually 2.0.29 and hasn't been changed for a long time! (I still have it so I don't break my pcmcia ethernet, mostly due to laziness). Only problem I have seen is that the new system tried to load every possible kernel module on the planet, include a dreaded sbpcd module that spends 10 minutes looking for its card on bootup. There are warnings during the upgrade about this, and pointers to the new module loading configuration. Thanks for the excellent work. nathan Pollywog [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On 26-Dec-1999 Tobias Zimpel wrote: Well, I broke my system completely a few weeks ago with a simple (segfaulting) 'apt-get dist-upgrade' while I was running potato for months without serious problems. There was no chance to repair it; I couldn't even boot, and I didn't manage to repair it using a rescue disk. The only sollution was to install the whole system new from the scratch. :-( But I'd say that potato is stable enough to use it without serious problems. I am running potato on my other machine, but I want to upgrade my laptop from Slink to Potato. If I understand correctly, you had to install a whole new Potato system from scratch. That is exactly what I want to avoid; I want to upgrade the system I have now. thanks -- Andrew -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null -- N a t h a n O . S i e m e r s Bioinformatics Division of Applied Genomics Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute Hopewell Building 3B, P.O. Box 5400, Princeton, NJ 08543-5400 609 818-6568 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
On 27-Dec-1999 Nathan O. Siemers wrote: One apparrent success: apt-get dist-upgrade slink - potato on an old ast laptop. The kernel is actually 2.0.29 and hasn't been changed for a long time! (I still have it so I don't break my pcmcia ethernet, mostly due to laziness). I broke my pcmcia stuff and I am unable to fix it. I think it has to do with trying to install a kernel the Debian way. I will trying reinstalling a small slink system and then upgrade via ppp. If that does not work, I will have to wait for Potato CD's to be released. thanks -- Andrew
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
On Mon, 27 Dec 1999, Pollywog wrote: On 27-Dec-1999 Nathan O. Siemers wrote: One apparrent success: apt-get dist-upgrade slink - potato on an old ast laptop. The kernel is actually 2.0.29 and hasn't been changed for a long time! (I still have it so I don't break my pcmcia ethernet, mostly due to laziness). I broke my pcmcia stuff and I am unable to fix it. I think it has to do with trying to install a kernel the Debian way. I will trying reinstalling a small slink system and then upgrade via ppp. If that does not work, I will have to wait for Potato CD's to be released. Could you describe the problem? I upgraded my Thinkpad 560 to potato 4 weeks ago. However, I normally network the machine with a Dlink pcmcia ethernet card which still works fine. What's broken is my ability to use a standard USR 28.8 pcmcia serial modem card. The kernel reports that the card is identified properly, the light is on, but the modem is not detected. It would be great to solve this one. BTW, I didn't know about the debian-laptop list until today. That might be the best place to discuss this. Thanks. Syrus. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Syrus Nemat-Nasser [EMAIL PROTECTED]UCSD Physics Dept.
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
On Mon, Dec 27, 1999 at 07:18:09PM -, Pollywog wrote: I broke my pcmcia stuff and I am unable to fix it. I think it has to do with trying to install a kernel the Debian way. I will trying reinstalling a small slink system and then upgrade via ppp. If that does not work, I will have to wait for Potato CD's to be released. PCMCIA support depends upon some kernel modules which are provided in a seperate package to the kernel. When you install a new kernel you also need to install a version of these modules that matches your new kernel. You should either install the version of pcmcia-modules corresponding to your kernel or install the pcmcia-source package and use that to build the modules. I tend to keep a copy of pcmcia-source installed all the time on my laptop in case something goes wrong. -- Mark Brown mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Trying to avoid grumpiness) http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/ EUFShttp://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
On 27-Dec-1999 Syrus Nemat-Nasser wrote: BTW, I didn't know about the debian-laptop list until today. That might be the best place to discuss this. I did not know until now :) thanks -- Andrew
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
On 27-Dec-1999 Mark Brown wrote: PCMCIA support depends upon some kernel modules which are provided in a seperate package to the kernel. When you install a new kernel you also need to install a version of these modules that matches your new kernel. I did that, but still lost pcmcia. You should either install the version of pcmcia-modules corresponding to your kernel or install the pcmcia-source package and use that to build the modules. I tend to keep a copy of pcmcia-source installed all the time on my laptop in case something goes wrong. I did that too, kept a backup, and a modules backup too :) Anyway, I am installing potato now on my laptop, from scratch. I will then see what /usr/src should look like on a new system. I want to try installing kernels the Debian way on my laptop. I don't do it that way on my other machine. -- Andrew
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
Pollywog wrote: I recall seeing many posts about systems being rendered unusable or broken after upgrade from Slink to Potato. Is this still a problem? I do not want to try it if I will just break my system. I am a reformed Red Hat user. I've upgraded to potato on both my machines, and have had no significant problems, other than the occasional updated package that is broken. These are usually fixed in a day or two, and info about them is always available on this list. I use linux exclusively, and am happy with potato. I would assume that others who might use their boxes differently than I do, such as for networking, may have had other experiences and may be able to shed more light on the subject. Les Eckert
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
On Sun, Dec 26, 1999 at 07:42:37PM -, Pollywog wrote: On 26-Dec-1999 kometboy wrote: [Updating to potato] Thanks for your thoughts on the subject. I could be wrong, but it seems I saw more than a few posts from people who had upgraded and had some not-so-minor problems. Unless someone says ...no, don't do it because... I probably will try it. Well, I broke my system completely a few weeks ago with a simple (segfaulting) 'apt-get dist-upgrade' while I was running potato for months without serious problems. There was no chance to repair it; I couldn't even boot, and I didn't manage to repair it using a rescue disk. The only sollution was to install the whole system new from the scratch. :-( But I'd say that potato is stable enough to use it without serious problems. HTH Ciao Tobias -- .signature lost... -- Andrew -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null --
Re: safe to upgrade slink to potato?
On 26-Dec-1999 Tobias Zimpel wrote: Well, I broke my system completely a few weeks ago with a simple (segfaulting) 'apt-get dist-upgrade' while I was running potato for months without serious problems. There was no chance to repair it; I couldn't even boot, and I didn't manage to repair it using a rescue disk. The only sollution was to install the whole system new from the scratch. :-( But I'd say that potato is stable enough to use it without serious problems. I am running potato on my other machine, but I want to upgrade my laptop from Slink to Potato. If I understand correctly, you had to install a whole new Potato system from scratch. That is exactly what I want to avoid; I want to upgrade the system I have now. thanks -- Andrew
