Weblog entry #193 for ajt
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As I use apt-cacher-ng I thought it wise to first download everything so the cache mechanism wouldn't break anything. So I changed the sources and did an aptitude update then an aptitude -d -y full-upgrade. Next I installed apt aptitude dpkg and let it sort out any dependencies, then did a safe-upgrade followed by a full-upgrade.
Where possible I tried to let it install the maintainer's version of config files, I have mine rsnapshotted. Once it was all done, I upgraded the kernel and added a few things that weren't in Lenny that I wanted and purged things like kqemu that have gone. I rebooted, which confirmed that GRUB2 and the new style sysv-rc was working, purged grub-legacy and rebooted again (all okay).
At the moment I'm blackilisting kernel modules I don't require, and fixing some breakages, for example Dovecot and nfsv4 which complained about the old config files. Overall it's been pretty painless, less than 2 hours so far including most of the fixes. Next up my partner's desktop system - which will be more complex, KDE3 to KDE4 transition on that box...
Comments on this Entry
I'd already done one upgrade that way which worked okay. In theory I probably should have used apt-get, but it didn't cause any problems.
The big problem is when you have lots of changes in a config file, if you don't install the maintainer's copy then some things don't work but if you do install the maintainer's copy then you lose your localisations.
Can't use GNOME as I detest it - everything about it is wrong or ugly - it's only a personal opinion of course...!
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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I run testing on my desktop system, so I've been running KDE4 for a few months now. I can confess that that at first I didn't like it, but I've had it for about 6-months now and I can say that it's a massive visual improvement on KDE3 - which I did like, and light years ahead of GNOME.
Performance is another topic. The earlier versions were very resource hungry and incredibly unstable but the version in stable seems to be pretty reliable though it does put a huge load on the graphics system and the RAM. On my desktop which has a 2.6 GHz AMD64 CPU, 2 GiB of DDR RAM and an old ATI AGP graphics card, it can be quite sluggish visually - video in particular is slow, but on my cheap laptop: Celeron 1.6 GHz; 2 GiB DDR3 RAM and cheap but new Intel graphics card, it does feel a lot faster - video in particular is responsive.
I tried KDE4 on an old Intel P3-750 MHz system with a basic AGP graphics card and on that it was UNUSABLE, so it's running FLuxbox at the moment which is more than capable for it. My real challenge is to put KDE4/Squeeze on my partner's desktop, it's identical to mine but has an older nvidia graphics card in it - I've yet to see if will cut the mustard... Not having Quanta+ is also not going to go down well as she uses that a lot - hence my delay in upgrading the box.
Summary: KDE3 and KDE4 are visually very different. KDE4 does need a fast modern CPU, lots of RAM and if you want fancy graphics a modern graphics card with plenty of omph! To my eyes KDE4 is pretty but it did take time to get use to and I can see not everyone liking it!
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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Which I have found make life easier, especially with KDE.
You can always tell them that now is a good time to switch to GNOME ;)
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