http://www.ComputerBob.com/guides/my_debian_adventure_part_2_lenny.php .
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by ComputerBob
May 18, 2008
Last Updated June 9, 2008
I've been using Linux full-time instead of Windows since July, 2006. After happily using SimplyMepis Linux for 15 months, I switched to using Debian Linux full-time in December, 2007, after I installed Debian Etch (KDE) for the very first time. I carefully documented that entire installation and its subsequent configuration in My Debian Adventure.
Since then, I've been very happily using Debian Etch, the "Stable" branch of the Debian family of distros. Once I experienced Etch's rock-solid performance, I was never even tempted to delve into the newer Debian Lenny (Testing branch) or Debian Sid (Unstable branch), even though those other branches had newer Linux kernels and software versions.
All of that changed yesterday. Now I'm using Debian Lenny and I probably won't go back to using Etch. This article explains why, and describes my Debian Adventure with Lenny.
I use the Quanta Plus web development application in Debian Etch (KDE) to create all of my web sites, including this one. After having to deal with occasional crashes in version 3.5.5 of Quanta for months — often while cutting and pasting large blocks of code — I finally decided to try installing version 3.5.7 from the Debian Backports site. So yesterday, I went to that site and followed its instructions to add its repository to my sources.list file. Then I issued the proper apt-get install command to manually download and install the newer Quanta Plus. Apt showed me several messages, informing me that it was going to upgrade several libraries in order solve the new version's dependencies, so I approved those upgrades. I was relieved when the Quanta upgrade went fine, without any errors. But as soon as I tried to start the new Quanta, I was presented with a series of about 8 error messages, telling me that it couldn't find my web projects, that my URLs were incorrect, that there was no mime type for application octet-stream, and other scary things. For awhile, I tried to figure out how to uninstall the new backported Quanta so that I could revert back to the older (but working) version, but I finally gave up and decided to just restore my entire installed-and-configured root partition from a backup that I had made about a week ago.
I would have thought that reverting back to a pre-backports version of my entire root partition would have fixed everything. But to make a long story short, it didn't work. No matter what I tried, including restoring 3 different backups from up to a month ago, and also restoring my /home folder, it appeared that my nvidia video drivers were messed up. I couldn't get past the KDE login screen. Each time I logged in, my LCD screen went black for several seconds and then I was returned to the KDE login screen again.
If you have a strong stomach or are curious, here's are the details. (If you don't, or aren't, then just skip over the shaded area):
When I tried to start Quanta after installing the new Quanta Plus backport, it immediately threw out a bunch of errors, including the well-hated one about not finding mime type "octet-stream," even though I had solved that problem by manually adding that filetype to both my user and root accounts several months ago. Once I "OK'd" that error, several more popped up, telling me that it couldn't find my web project, that my URL was incorrect, etc., etc., etc.
Even worse, when I restarted my PC, my KDE login screen appeared, but I couldn't get PAST it! Every time I entered my password, it went to black for about 5 seconds and then took me right back to the KDE login screen again.
By pressing CTRL-ALT-F1, I could drop down to a command prompt, and I could login as my user and as root there without any problem, so I figured that I must be experiencing an nvidia video driver problem.
So, at the command prompt I reinstalled the nvidia drivers "the Debian way." It didn't make any difference at all. I still couldn't get past the KDE login screen.
So, at the command prompt, logged in as root, I used the nano text editor to manually edit my xorg.conf file. I changed my driver from "nvidia" to "nv" then did a CTRL-ALT-F7 to go back to the KDE login screen, where I did a CTRL-ALT-Backspace to restart X. It didn't make any difference at all. I still couldn't get past the KDE login screen.
So I went back to the CLI, ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, and manually reset everything back to the "nvidia" driver. It didn't make any difference at all.
So I ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg again, and reset everything back to the "nv" driver. It still didn't make any difference at all.
Finally, I decided to just blow away my entire root partition and restore it from a backup that I had made just last week. I rebooted my PC into an old copy of Mepis Linux 6.5 that I keep on a separate partition for just such occasions, used its copy of GParted to reformat my Debian Etch root partition, used its KwikDisk application to mount my newly formatted Debian root partition and my backup partition, and then used an rsync command to copy my Debian root partition backup onto the newly formatted Debian root partition. After all of that, I rebooted my PC and chose my newly restored Debian Etch installation from the GRUB menu. It booted right up, but I still couldn't get past that KDE login screen.
So I rebooted my PC back into Mepis again and restored a backup of my root partition that I had made a few weeks ago. I still couldn't get past that KDE login screen.
So I restored a backup of my root partition that I had made a month ago. I still couldn't get past that KDE login screen.
I wondered how that could be possible, that even blowing away and restoring my entire root paritition hadn't solved the problem. Thinking that maybe something in the backports installation might have changed something in my /home partition, I blew away my /home partition and restored it from a backup of it that I had made 9 days ago.
It still didn't make any difference at all. I still couldn't get past that KDE login screen.
How can it possibly be that everything was working just fine for the past few months, without any nvidia problems and now, after installing one stupid backport, I can't get past the KDM login screen so my whole system is unusable for my purposes, even after restoring both my root and my home partitions to their "pre-backport" states??? I didn't know what else I could possibly do to fix the problem.
Looking back at everything that I tried, the only explanation I could think of was that somehow, when I reformatted my root partition, using GParted in my old Mepis 6.5 intallation on a separate partition, GParted told me that the partition was empty but maybe it didn't actually delete the old files at all. If that's what happened, then each time I ran my rsync command to restore one of my backups, rsync found newer versions of my backup files already in my root partition, so of course it didn't overwrite them. Once again, if that's what happened, then I never solved my login problem because even after I restored each backup, my Debian root partition still had the exact same "messed up" files that it had before I had formatted it.
Thinking that maybe that's what had happened, I tried booting into Mepis, mounting my Debian Etch root partition, opening Konqueror in Superuser mode, and manually deleting all of its files and folders. Then, I used GParted to reformat that partition again, just to make sure.
Then I restored my month-old backup again. And I still couldn't get past the KDE login screen.
It was a baffling mystery, and it really, really bothers me that I couldn't solve it. I wanted to figure out what was causing the problem and fix it — after all, I'm a problem-solver at heart. Even though I really wanted to solve it, I knew that if I couldn't solve it, I could at least get around it by reinstalling Debian Etch KDE from my Debian Etch 4.0 KDE CD #1, while preserving my /home folder that contains all of my personal configuration choices.
But before reinstalling Debian Etch, I decided that now would be as good a time as any to try Debian Lenny, which is currently the "Debian Testing" branch, but is scheduled to replace Etch as the "Debian Stable" branch this September. I downloaded a Lenny (Testing) Netinstall CD and used it to install a base system onto a separate partition from Etch. I installed the base system by selecting only "Standard system" (deselecting "Desktop environment") when the installer asked me what I wanted it to install. When the installation was finished, I booted into it, and since I hadn't installed any desktop environment, I was faced with a command prompt. I logged in as root and then issued the command aptitude install kde-desktop. Yes, I know that doing that installs all kinds of software that I don't want or need, but I'd rather have it do that than have to remember to manually install everything that I want and need afterward. In case you're wondering why I didn't install a "Desktop environment" during the initial installation, it's because by default, Debian Netinstall CD always installs the GNOME desktop environment, and I don't want GNOME — I've tried GNOME in the past, but I much prefer to use KDE. I found several references to a couple different "cheat codes" that you can type in when you start the installation, to tell the Netinstall CD that you want it to automatically install KDE. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything that told me the exact syntax of either of those cheat codes, so I wasted nearly five hours waiting for files to download while I tried installing with two different cheat codes in two separate installations. Each time, the installer downloaded 858 files for almost 2.5 hours, over my inexpensive 92 kB/second DSL connection, but I ended up with a system that had the GNOME desktop environment instead of KDE. That was very frustrating, so I finally decided to install just the base system of Lenny and then add KDE to it afterward, as described here — when I did that, the installer downloaded 750 files in about 1 hour and 38 minutes, and I got my KDE desktop without GNOME.
My first impression is that Debian Lenny is really snappy! With its default "nv" video driver, Lenny boots to a usable desktop several seconds faster than Etch does with its "nvidia" video driver on my computer. In fact, Lenny's, "nv" driver runs fast enough that I don't even need to install the nvidia video driver that caused me so much trouble in Etch yesterday. Lenny also has much newer versions of Quanta Plus (3.5.9 vs. 3.5.5), OpenOffice.org (2.4 vs. 2.0), and K3b (1.0.4 vs. 0.12.17) as well as a much newer linux kernel (2.6.24-x or 2.6.22-x vs. Etch's 2.6.18-x). And because I keep my email and browser profiles on my separate data partition, it only took a couple of minutes to edit two lines in Icedove's (Thunderbird's) and Iceweasel's (Firefox's) profiles.ini, files, to point them to my existing profiles. It only took another couple of minutes to set up my Brother HL-5240 laser printer in Lenny, once I realized that I had to install cupsys first, since it wasn't installed by default. And the Lenny repositories already contain Phatch, which allowed me to point and click in the Synaptic package manager to install that digital photo batch processing software that I had to manually install in Etch last week.
By the way, someone in the Debian User Forums recommended that I should try reinstalling GRUB, to see if that would solve my problem in Etch. Well, Lenny installed its own GRUB onto the Master Boot Record, and it successfully found and set up a GRUB menu entry for Debian Etch. And when I chose that entry, Etch booted up just fine, but it still wouldn't let me past the KDE login screen. So reinstalling GRUB didn't solve Etch's problem either.
After I installed Debian Lenny, it only took me a little while to reinstall Debian Etch (while preserving its home folder) to get it working again with its default "nv" video driver. But I haven't taken the time to reinstall its troublesome nvidia driver, so its video display is noticeably less responsive than Lenny's. If I were to reinstall the nvidia driver into Etch, I'd be right back where I was before, taking a chance that something that I do to my system in the future might bring back that same unsolvable problem that the nvidia drivers gave me yesterday. And I sure don't want to ever have to face that problem again. Besides, Lenny runs fine without the nvidia driver.
I didn't know it at the time, but yesterday's problems with the Debian Backport of Quanta Plus may have been a mixed blessing — it was a big hassle to spend an entire day trying to solve those problems, but now that I was "forced" to try Debian Lenny a few months earlier than its "Debian Stable" release, I'm probably going to stick with Lenny from now on.
In fact, I'm using Quanta Plus v3.5.9 in Debian Lenny to write this article.
Except for feeling more responsive, Debian Lenny looks and works just like Debian Etch to me, so it's turning out to be extremely easy to transition from Etch to Lenny. Here's a list of what I've installed and configured so far, to make Lenny "my own." NOTE: I will continue to add items to this list in the future.
Of course, I also configured my desktop and tweaked many other interface settings, using My Debian Adventure as a guide to remind me how I wanted things to look. I guess I'll go through my entire Debian Adventure, to see what else I might want to configure in Lenny, but at this point, I'm already "up and running" and my Lenny system looks and works pretty much the same as my Etch system, only faster.
Things are continuing to go really well for me in Debian Lenny. I'm still using Debian Etch (on a separate partition), but only as a maintenance and troubleshooting distro, the same way I used Mepis Linux 6.5 for the past 5 months. For example, I edited Etch's /etc/fstab so that I can use KwikDisk to manually mount my backup partition from within Etch. Then I installed Partimage in Etch, mounted my backup partition and used Partimage to make a compressed image of Lenny's completely installed-and-configured root partition onto my backup partition. I'm pretty much done tweaking Lenny to look and work exactly the way I want. I haven't had time to look at My Debian Adventure yet, to see if there's anything I've forgotten, but right now, I think the only thing left on my Lenny to-do list is to install and configure my rsync backup script, to make regular backups of Lenny's home partition and my data.
My Debian Etch installation continues to work just fine as a maintenance and troubleshooting distro. And since I installed Phatch in Debian Lenny, to batch-process digital photos — instead of using the konq-kim batch-processing utilities in Mepis 6.5 — it's starting to look like I might not need my Mepis 6.5 installation any more.
If I don't run into any problems using Etch to maintain my Lenny installation, I may uninstall Mepis 6.5 and free up some space on my main hard drive, leaving only Lenny and Etch. Eventually, I may even uninstall Etch and just install a clone of Lenny in its place. That would allow me to use the cloned Lenny installation to maintain my main Lenny installation. There's no hurry, but it looks like that's probably what I'm eventually going to end up doing.