Archive for September 2nd, 2009

Debian Lenny 64 AMD to Debian Squeeze 64 AMD update

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

I decided to upgrade my Debian to Squeeze on my Thinkpad R61 because I was not happy with the software prebundled with Debian Lenny 5 is already one year behind the recent versions available in unstable.
The update wasn’t anything special as a procedure. I’ve googled around to find a tutorial or somebody else experience on the topic and I stumbled upon The following upgrade instructions . I’ve followed literally the steps described there.

1. aptitude update
2. aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
3. aptitude full-upgrade

After that I had to confirm a couple of times that I do agree the selected packages for upgrade to proceed. After the packages were downloaded and installed, I was required to decide if I want to keep some of the old custom configuration files I’ve edited or accept the package maintainer version. This was the hardest part of the upgrade since I have to check file by file what custom settings have I set in a numerous conf files. After some time when all that was over. I had to execute again
4. aptitude full-upgade, one more or times until no more packages were left for upgrade.
. Then I executed,
5. apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and upgraded even some more packages :).After that I had fully functional update. Debian Unstable Squeeze/Sid prooved to run correctly, it comes with kernel 2.6.30, Gnome 2.6.26.1. Right after I did login into my Gnome Profile, an error message poped-up. I did a quick check in Google about the problem just to find The following Bug Report . The gnome-settings-daemon package that was problematic is 2.6.24 just to compare the rest of the gnome package versions are 2.6.26. The suggested solution to the problem was to install gnome-setting-daemon from Debian Unstable or simply ignore the error message, since the message showed up and seemed not to have any impact on the gnome operation. Many things changed there behaviour like keyboard settings and the way the system works. That irritated me a lot. My video players (mplayer, vlc) subtitles in cyrillic (cp1251) aren’t showing correctly as well. I have to note here that my default language settings are on a purpose set to en_US.UTF-8. I’m still looking for a permanent solution to the problem. I’ve discovered that if I do
set: # export LANG=bg_BG.CP1251 to my gnome-terminal and then execute the players the cyrillic show up correctly. I’ve tried various things and configurations in both mplayer and vlc. My current mplayer.conf settings are:
zoom=1subfont-encoding=unicodesubcp=cp1251subfont-autoscale=1subfont-text-scale=3,60subfont-osd-scale=6font=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/arhangai/arhangai.ttfframedrop=yesslang=bgalang=bgThis settings are reported to work by many people out there and they really do if I export my LANG to bg_BG.CP1251, however with a different LANG settings they fail to work :(.
Right after the upgrade I was also experiencing warnings during boot, proclaiming messages like:
WARNING: All config files need .conf: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
.To get rid of this annoying messages I had to enter /etc/modprobe.d/ and assure myself that all file names possess the extension .conf.
To sum up I was quite disappointed of my stupid idea to upgrade my debian distro to unstable. I would probably not upgrade it if I was aware of the consequences …END—–