[Sussex] Online with Ubuntu

[Gavin Stevens]

Steve,

Steve Dobson wrote:

>I await your return to the fold.
>
>  
>
Sometimes the path of understanding means spending a little time away 
from our favourite things.

>>My Debian installation broke while trying to upgrade to Sarge & it 
>>seemed a good time to try Ubuntu.
>>    
>>
>
>This worries me.  An upgrade shouldn't break now.  Sarge is frozen and
>therefore very, very close (for debian read less than six months [plus])
>for becoming stable.
>
>I've had no problem upgrading.  So can I ask what commands you used to
>upgrade?
>
>  
>
I used apt-get update & apt-get dist-upgrade (having added the testing 
URLs to apt-sources). It seemed happy with these - I've noticed before 
that apt-get is very clear about what's right & wrong. It was only after 
quite a lot of the upgrade had taken place that an error message 
appeared & it just stopped. Attempts to continue proved fruitless, it 
just wouldn't go past that point.

I wish that I had the sense to note the error message, but it seemed 
straightforward enough at the time. Maybe the connection broke, or a 
file corrupted? Whatever happened, the Sarge that came out the other end 
wasn't very happy.

Problems included the boot-up screens saying that it was Debian/testing, 
but a significant number of packages hadn't upgraded at all - for 
example, I was still on Mozilla 1.0.0 after the upgrade, but a look in 
dselect said that I had 1.5.something installed. There were quite a lot 
like this. Some packages had upgraded & I think this just added to the 
problems rather than easing them.

Being unsure as to: a) the cause of the failure & b) exactly how badly 
damaged the installation was (it was working, but was very slow & lumpy 
with bits of Icewm missing [no background, no icepref, icemenu not 
working], Sylpheed wasn't happy & XMMS didn't seem to know what it was 
supposed to do, among other problems), I concluded that starting again 
was the best option.

I originally planned to shrink a partition slightly to make room for 
Ubuntu alongside Debian, but it seemed worth trying Ubuntu on its own 
given the circumstances.

This was the first time I've tried an online upgrade & I'm disappointed 
it didn't work out (v slow with dial-up, as well). However, I shall 
return to Debian before too long.

Gavin.