For about a year now, I've been running Debian
on my desktop. I tried out unstable for a little bit, had problems
(been such a long time I don't recall what they were), so went to
testing back near the beginning. Now the new stable is Sarge, and
I've waited a few weeks for things to settle down, and I'm now
doing an `apt-get update && apt-get update` from
Sarge/stable to etch/testing. That's probably not the best way to
go from one Debian distribution (Sarge) to another (etch); `apt-get
dist-upgrade` would get uninstalled dependencies, but I'll be
conservative.
When Sarge was officially released, I changed my
/etc/apt/sources.list to replace occurrences of 'testing' with
'stable', and now I've rolled back the changes, replacing 'stable'
with 'testing'.
An aside: I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A., and while there
are .deb repositories physically close to me, those physically
close repositories aren't necessarily the ones with the largest
bandwidth. Some sites throttle, so choosing the closest physically
might lengthen the time for downloads. The excellent program
apt-spy
'[p]arses a list of mirrors and tests each of the mirrors for
bandwidth. Writes a /etc/apt/sources.list file based on the
responses it gets.' I haven't re-run apt-spy after rolling back the
changes, but I noticed that downloading the packages topped out at
close to 600 kB/s on the cable modem.
Doing `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade` returned
Get:1 http://debian.uchicago.edu testing/main Packages
[3432kB]
Get:2 ftp://ftp.us.debian.org testing/main Packages [3439kB]
Get:3 http://debian.uchicago.edu testing/main Release [81B]
[snip]
Fetched 8509kB in 14s (573kB/s)
Reading Package Lists... Done
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
bind9-host dnsutils evolution libgcj-common ted
ted-common
The following packages will be upgraded:
alien apt-listbugs arj aspell aspell-bin bacula-common
bacula-console
bacula-director-common bacula-fd bacula-sd balsa
base-config base-files bash
[snip]
xemacs21-support xemacs21-supportel xlibs xlibs-data
xlibs-static-dev
xosview zip
297 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not
upgraded.
Need to get 182MB/215MB of archives.
After unpacking 17.4MB disk space will be freed.
E: You don't have enough free space in
/var/cache/apt/archives/.
Oops. Need to do `apt-get clean` to blow away the archives cache,
and the downloads then proceeded.
Fetched 215MB in 9m56s (361kB/s)
Reading package fields... Done
Reading package status... Done
Retrieving bug reports... Done
grave bugs of libmagick6 (6:6.0.6.2-2.2 -> 6:6.0.6.2-2.4) <
done >
#314628 - libmagick6: Missing dependency (libltdl3) on amd64
platform
grave bugs of imagemagick (6:6.0.6.2-2.2 -> 6:6.0.6.2-2.4) <
done >
#315013 - display command fails with "error while loading
shared libraries"
[snip]
Summary:
xlibs(1 bug), webmin(1 bug), initrd-tools(1 bug),
bittorrent(1 bug), libmagick6(1 bug), imagemagick(2 bugs),
mozilla(1 bug), squid(2 bugs)
Are you sure you want to install/upgrade the above packages?
[Y/n/?/...]
The bug retrieval is courtesy of
apt-listbugs,
an even more excellent program than apt-spy. Note the '< done
>' flags on libmagick6 and imagemagick: I'll ignore those bug
reports and go ahead with the install. The other packages (xlibs,
webmin, initrd-tools, bittorrent, mozilla and squid) all have '<
open >' bugs, so I choose to
not install those. That
means tapping 'n' at the 'Are you sure you want to install/upgrade
the above packages?' prompt, which aborts the install and requires
me to do `apt-get install [package0, package1 ... packageN], but
with swipe and paste, putting the package names on one command line
is a snap. I just swipe the list of packages downloaded, paste it
into an editor, make sure the list is all one line (no carriage
returns), cut the packages with open bugs, swipe it again and last,
paste it after `apt-get install` on a root commandline.
xemacs21-gnome-mule xemacs21-mule
xemacs21-mulesupport xemacs21-support
xemacs21-supportel xosview zip
274 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 29 not
upgraded.
Need to get 0B/167MB of archives.
After unpacking 18.5MB disk space will be freed.
Reading package fields... Done
Reading package status... Done
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Reading changelogs... [here follows an announcement which I exit
by tapping 'q']
Now I proceed to the configurations. Defaults are usually sane, and
my rule of thumb is to accept defaults unless I know a different
selection is what I want or need. The first program to configure is
chkrootkit:
the option is to 'only report problems if they differ from the
previous day's run', and I choose the default 'No'.
sysstat is
next: its data format changed, and I get a warning that '[e]xisting
data files need to be deleted.' I have no need for old data, so I
tap < enter > to select 'OK' and then agree to the old file
deletion.
Verbose 'Unpacking replacement [packagename]', 'Preparing to
replace [packagename]', 'Setting up [packagename]', a few items
such as 'Stopping periodic command scheduler: cron' (inetd,
powertweak and FAM daemons've also stopped; note to self: make sure
inetd, powertweak, FAM and cron've restarted afterwards), note a
problem in the xemacs compilation: loading erc (e[macs]rc: the
emacs relay chat 'client') resulted in an unspecified error ... and
I'm back to a root prompt with no other errors returned.
`ps ax|egrep "(inet|powert|fam|cron)"` shows the daemons
running.
Success. If I want, I can see why the packages bind9-host dnsutils
evolution libgcj-common ted ted-common were held back. Probably an
uninstalled dependency.