Linux Tech Talk
August 14th, 2009 by ComputerBob
If you’re not a Linux geek, you probably won’t understand or care about this particular Journal post, so just skip it and don’t feel guilty.
I’ve been using Debian Squeeze (the Debian Testing branch) for about 6 months; ever since a couple of weeks after it was first released. Back when I first upgraded from Debian Lenny to Debian Squeeze, Squeeze came with the same KDE 3.5.x desktop environment that I had grown to learn and love in both Debian Lenny and Debian Etch.
But a few months ago, the Debian Testing repositories started offering an upgrade to KDE 4.x. I didn’t want to move to KDE4 yet — mostly because I had read a lot of negative reviews of its many bugs, omissions and problems.
But I also didn’t want to have to downgrade my new Squeeze system back to down Lenny — with its older applications and libraries — just to be able to keep running KDE 3.5.x.
So I decided to ignore Squeeze’s KDE 4.x upgrade and keep using Squeeze with KDE 3.5.x., while I waited for the Debian Testing/Squeeze repositories to start offering KDE 4.3.x — which is reportedly very good.
The easiest way to do that was to stop installing any of Squeeze’s upgrades. Sure, I knew that many of those upgrades that I was holding back didn’t have anything to do with KDE4, but I didn’t want to spend all the time that I knew it would take to carefully and selectively upgrade only Squeeze’s non-KDE packages.
At first, I held back about 100 upgrades.
But, over time, that number slowly swelled every few days until, yesterday morning, I saw that I was holding back a whopping 567 upgrades.
That’s an awful lot of upgrades, so last night, I finally decided that I’d better do the work that it would take to upgrade everything in my Squeeze installation except KDE, since the Debian Testing/Squeeze repositories were still offering KDE 4.2.4 (which I don’t want).
Yes, it took a long time. Using the Synaptic package manager, I carefully installed only about 20 upgrades at a time, while double-checking each group of upgrades and holding back any upgrades that wanted to delete any of my KDE 3.5.x packages and replace them with KDE 4.2.4 packages.
It took me a couple of hours, but I eventually installed every upgrade and its dependencies — except for the 134 upgrades that would have switched me from KDE3 to KDE4.
Then I held my breath, shut down my PC, waited 20 seconds, and powered it up again.
During its boot-up sequence, one-line appeared in red, warning me that “FAM is not running… failed.” A quick online search revealed that the Linux File Alteration Monitor is actually running just fine, and the error message that says that it isn’t is caused by a harmless bug that has already been reported to the Debian developers.
After making sure that my NTP, email, browsing and a few other things were still working, I shut down my PC again without seeing any error messages and then powered it up again. And again, the “FAM” message was the only error messsage.
I’ve been using my newly upgraded Squeeze system for the past several hours, and everything seems to be working just fine.
But I was prepared in case anything went wrong: Before I even starting doing the upgrades, I used rsync to copy my entire root partition to a separate hard drive, so that if I had to, I could easily restore my PC back to its pre-upgrade condition.
C’mon, KDE 4.3 — I’m still waiting for you!
UPDATE, 8:30 PM: Tonight, I downloaded and installed an additional 20 new non-KDE upgrades, including a new Linux kernel — 2.6.30-1-686, which is reportedly an important upgrade from my previous 2.6.26-2-686 kernel. So far, I haven’t noticed any differences while running it. Maybe I don’t do anything that utilizes the new kernel’s improvements.
I’m still holding back the 134 KDE4 upgrades.
UPDATE, Sunday, August 16, 2009, 6:30 AM: I just downloaded and installed an additional 12 new non-KDE upgrades, including a FAM upgrade that fixed the error-message bug that I described above.
Until KDE 4.3.x is released for Debian Testing/Squeeze, I’m going to keep upgrading my Squeeze system with all new non-KDE upgrades, and holding back any KDE-related upgrades.
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