Sunday, April 21, 2013

Upgrading to Debian GNU/Linux 7 "wheezy" + XFCE

Last night I took the plunge and upgraded my Debian GNU/Linux 6 "squeeze" install to "wheezy"...here's my running log of updates.

2013-04-20

Referencing http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html:

sudo dpkg --audit
grep -q '^flags.*\bpae\b' /proc/cpuinfo && echo yes || echo no  
(returned "no"...old hw without pae : o ( )

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
--changed all my sources from squeeze to wheezy. Note: commented out backports for wheezy
sudo apt-get update
--updated sources...this took a few minutes
sudo apt-get -o APT::Get::Trivial-Only=true dist-upgrade
-- this told me whether or not I had enough space for the upgrade (yes)
sudo apt-get upgrade
-- this upgraded a bunch of stuff...took about 45 minutes

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -o APT::Immediate-Configure=0 APT::Force-LoopBreak=1
-- the main upgrade...I received errors when I just ran "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade": "E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'package'.  Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details." I also got an conflict/pre-depend error for xml-core and docbook-xml...ugh. So, I started uninstalling things:
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get remove default-jre

sudo apt-get remove xml-core
sudo apt-get remove gnome
sudo apt-get remove kde
sudo apt-get remove libreoffice
sudo apt-get remove openoffice.org
sudo apt-get remove gcc
sudo apt-get remove openjdk-6-jre

finally: 
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This ran overnight.

2013-04-21

In the morning, I awoke to a screen warning about the 686 kernel. After the dist-upgrade completed, I installed the 486 kernel, as suggested:

sudo apt-get install linux-image-486
sudo apt-get remove linux-image-686
sudo apt-get remove linux-image-2.6-686
sudo apt-get install gnome
sudo apt-get install default-jre
sudo apt-get install xml-core
sudo apt-get install kde
sudo apt-get install libreoffice
sudo apt-get install openoffice.org
sudo apt-get install gcc
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre

sudo apt-get autoremove
-- a sanity check
sudo apt-get check
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install google-chrome-unstable
sudo dpkg --audit

sudo apt-get remove adobereader-enu
sudo apt-get remove dhcp3-client dhcp3-common 
sudo apt-get remove gcj-jre-headless
sudo apt-get install gcj-jre-headless
sudo apt-get remove bogofilter doc-debian
sudo apt-get install bogofilter doc-debian

Done. : o )

At this point I attempted to fix my sudoers file, as per instructions. I moved /etc/sudoers to /etc/sudoers.d/mychanges ... this was a mistake, because as soon as I did, I lost the ability to sudo things. x_x After a few reboots into recovery mode I successfully copied back /etc/sudoers.d/mychanges to /etc/sudoers and removed /etc/sudoers.d/mychanges.

Next, I ran the following to remove the unneeded grub menu entries:

sudo aptitude search linux-image
sudo aptitude remove linux-image-2.6.32-5-686 linux-image-3.2.0-4-686-pae linux-image-686-pae

I installed bootlogd to record the Radeon error messages I receive during boot:

sudo apt-get install bootlogd
sudo apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

This solved getting Gnome3 to load with all the bells and whistles.

However, this ended up being too slow, given my hardware. So I uninstalled it, per instructions:
  • sudo aptitude purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep gnome | cut -f 1`
  • sudo aptitude -f install
  • sudo aptitude purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall | cut -f 1`
  • sudo aptitude -f install
Unfortunately, this sequence of commands led to two undesirable side-effects:
  1. Network no longer worked
    • sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces
    • sudo dhclient eth0
    • ifconfig eth1 up
    • sudo iwconfig eth1 up
    • sudo iwconfig eth1 essid {ESSID}
    • sudo dhclient eth1
  2. GDM - gone...booted into tty prompt
    • Added to ~/.xinitrc: exec ck-launch-session startxfce4
    • sudo apt-get install gdm3
At this point, everything looks like it´s pretty stable...moving on to configuration.

Other things installed:

  • wicd
  • p7zip-full
  • p7zip
  • mtools

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