{"id":82,"date":"2008-12-14T14:50:13","date_gmt":"2008-12-14T21:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/?p=82"},"modified":"2008-12-14T14:50:13","modified_gmt":"2008-12-14T21:50:13","slug":"upgrading-from-etch-to-lenny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/upgrading-from-etch-to-lenny\/2008\/12\/14\/","title":{"rendered":"Upgrading from Etch to Lenny"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So my Debian Etch based server has been ticking along for a while now. I chose Etch over lots of other distros as I don&#8217;t like loads and loads of updates.\u00a0 I just want something reasonably stable and reasonably up to date.<\/p>\n<p>However, recently I tried to upgrade the non-free adobe flashplayer plugin to 10.something &#8230; and hey it doesn&#8217;t work on Etch. Basically the flashplayer needs a more modern glibc (as to why glibc keeps having so many major version changes is beyond me). Anyway, I started reading about the next version of Debian ; Lenny. They currently have it as an RC1 so I thought that must be reasonably stable. So I downloaded the netinst ISO for the 64 bit version. My current Etch is 32bit, and I&#8217;ve never seen much necessity to upgrade to 64 bit, as I don&#8217;t have lots of memory and I&#8217;ve never seen a review that says &#8216;the 64 bit version goes much better than the 32 bit one&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>So I installed the 64bit lenny on a separate disk to play with for a while. It all seemed good. Didn&#8217;t seen any faster really &#8230; but I did notice (at least for the 64 bit Lenny) that the flash player is the free one (can&#8217;t remember its name). I remember reading that adobe had recently released a <a href=\"http:\/\/labs.adobe.com\/technologies\/flashplayer10\/\">64 bit alpha version of the flashplayer for linux<\/a> &#8230; but the fact that it was alpha was a worry.<\/p>\n<p>I then remembered that debian lets you do a whole distribution upgrade and I had never tried it. So I made a dd backup of my root partition and gave it a shot. It&#8217;s relatively simple to do (google for &#8216;debian etch lenny dist&#8211;upgrade&#8217;):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>edit \/etc\/apt\/sources.list and change all the references to &#8216;etch&#8217; to &#8216;lenny&#8217;.<\/li>\n<li>Do a &#8216;apt-get update&#8217;<\/li>\n<li>Do a &#8216;apt-get dist-upgrade&#8217;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And then wait a long time. It does download a lot &#8230; and then you&#8217;ll get asked some questions about various packages and also some questions about some files that have changed. The latter generally related to some printer drivers I had manually installed. I made a note of these files but told the installer to use the new versions (After the install was finished I manually loopback mounted my dd of the old root partition and compared by hand)<\/p>\n<p>The main prob after the install was getting X windows to start. I have an nvidia video card and I had installed a linux driver using a driver direct from nvidia. I see now (maybe they&#8217;ve always been there) that you can install these nvidia drivers using apt-get. I can&#8217;t remember the exact steps, but it went something like;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>apt-get install nvidia-glx<\/li>\n<li>apt-get install nvidia-xconfig<\/li>\n<li>dpkg-reconfigure xserver -xorg<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I suggest googling for more help. The nvidia-xconfig thing seems to be definately required. And when you do the reconfigure I told it not to use the framebuffer for mode switching &#8230; but I&#8217;m not sure if thats required or not<\/p>\n<p>I also had problems printing afterwards. But that turned out to be a major &#8216;Doh!&#8217; moment as my printer had no paper in it &#8230; and the LED indicators aren&#8217;t exactly very descriptive.<\/p>\n<p>Speedwise, Lenny doesn&#8217;t seem much different. My gdm login possibly takes longer now &#8230; which I&#8217;m thinking may be more to do with data fragmentation due to the major upgrade. Not sure. I&#8217;ll see how it goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So my Debian Etch based server has been ticking along for a while now. I chose Etch over lots of other distros as I don&#8217;t like loads and loads of updates.\u00a0 I just want something reasonably stable and reasonably up to date. However, recently I tried to upgrade the non-free adobe flashplayer plugin to 10.something [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}