[Glastonbury] Downgrading with apt-get

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 01:40:39PM +0100, tim hall wrote:
> This is a fairly debian-specific question so I guess I'm asking Martin if I 
> might pick your brains or any of the other more experienced Linux heads out 
> there.
That's OK - Debian specific fine by me :) 
> I use dselect as a frontend for the whole apt-get upgrading mechanism. It's 
> brilliant for upgrading - I'm running Debian Stable on a 
> Linux-2.4.18-586-demudi kernel. I recently added the demudi/devel sources to 
> this list. This was not necessarily the best move and due to various reasons 
> I failed to install ALSA properly. I've tried dpkg-reconfigure and it keeps 
> telling me that I'm missing a module that clearly /is/ missing from the 
> module sources.
> 
> I can go into details if you like, but I think I shall bother the demudi and 
> Linux Audio Users list on this one first.
That's probably a good move.  I'm not really sure how far demudi 
kernels are modified. You may also want to look at the Agnula mailing 
lists since Agnula is a very slightly modified Debian intended for
audio and multimedia work.
> The question really, is how do I get back to where I was before I started? If 
> I comment out the relevant line in /etc/apt/sources.list will dselect 
> (apt-get) allow me to replace the programs with the earlier versions? (from 
> demudi/stable so to speak).
Comment out the /etc/apt/sources.list line.  Do an apt-get update ; 
apt-get dist-upgrade.  Dselect will probably then report that "n" 
packages are obsolete / local versions. Those n will be the modified ones 
you've downloaded.
> The development version of the 2.4.18 kernel that I'm using does seem to be 
> an improvment and I'm living in hope that I might be able to get either MusE 
> or Rosegarden-4 to run properly on my system - The clients work ok, but have 
> great trouble connecting to the sound subsystem, which is a bit useless when 
> you're trying to edit MIDI files.
> 
> Thanks in advance
> 
> tim hall
> 
It may be worth living more on the bleeding edge, potentially, not least
because the newer kernels have security fixes.  "Testing" / Sarge would 
be a hard upgrade over a dial-up, but I can potentially burn you the 
CD's and send them via Martin - that's about 11 cds.  apt-cdrom add 
would then add them to your list and you could apt-get update ; apt-get 
dist-upgrade from them.

Knoppix 3.3 is also an option.  Boot it from CD and see if it has
the required packages in it.  Knoppix tends to be Debian unstable-ish
but, of course, can be run entirely from CD without touching your hard
disks.

HTH,

Andy