On 08/27/2012 11:13 AM, jimmy wrote:
>
> On Mon, 27 Aug 2012, "D. Michael 
> McIntyre"<michael.mcint...@rosegardenmusic.com>  wrote:
>
>> My computer had been up for almost 18 months before I
>> decided to try
>> upgrading it.  You'd think I would have learned that
>> for every stable
>> thing in Linux there are 50,000 hopeless train wrecks in
>> between.
>>
>> I tire of this so-called progress.
>>
>
> I gave up on KDE and GNOME a couple of years ago, especially on a couple of 
> older laptops with not too much memory.  Now I use Fluxbox, with a few 
> commands in the ~/.fluxbox/startup file to startup some apps, since it 
> doesn't save session information.
>
> Again, I keep a few 20 GB partitions just so I can install separate versions 
> of Linux on each, wiping out oldest partition for the latest distro release.  
> It also help me recover configuration info from one of the other partitions 
> during the first few weeks as I install the apps I want.  Of course, I keep 
> my data in yet other logical partitions, separate from those bootable 
> partitions.  The arrangement saved me lots of time, headache, and heartache 
> along the way.
>
> I think most GUI applications are dumbing-down the users, keeping them 
> ignorant of how the system should work.  Various *buntu distros are also 
> dumbing down the user knowlege base, trying to cater to the dumb-users of 
> Windows and Macs.
>
> Perhaps I'll share my upgrade experience.  Since I'm using Debian 
> Sid/Unstable, the repository is almost always in state of constant change, 
> and some apps may have dependencies issue while the repository is changing.
>
> Yeah, early on I have had a couple of problematic upgrades that left Xorg 
> broken so everything was in text console mode.  A day or two later, continue 
> to try upgrade did clear everything, and that computer was again working.
>
> I have learned to do:
>
>     apt-get update
>     apt-get -d upgrade
>
> the "-d" option tell it to only download, but won't actually apply the 
> upgrade.  If there are packages missing, or have broken prerequisites, I 
> would not continue, but keep try those to commands until all the packages get 
> completely downloaded.  Once that's done without problems, I would go ahead 
> with
>
>     apt-get upgrade
>
> With all the needed packages and all prerequisite packages are already 
> downloaded, I only need to make sure the system partition has enough disk 
> space for the upgrade before answering "yes" to apply the upgrade.
>
> I don't think I have much of a problem with Linux system upgrade since.  Of 
> course, different distros not using apt package manager may have similar 
> options, you may want to look up such options.
>
> More often, I upgrade certain apps with
>
>     apt-get -d install someapp
>
> if there's no problems, then continue with
>
>     apt-get install someapp
>
> GUI apps and their convenience is one thing.  But they are not that smart, in 
> fact they dumb-down the user knowledge exposure of how and why things work 
> within the system.  The less they know, the more problems they will 
> encounter.  Generally speaking, the GUI app developers make too much 
> assumption, without error checking, or disk space checking.
>
> Good luck.
>
> Jimmy

I run Aptosid on 2 of my systems here. Works for me. Aptosid says to 
install/remove/update though apt-get, saying that none of the GUI 
package managers properly handle complex dependencies. I don't know, I 
use Synaptic to check for upgrades, then some shell scripts to upgrade 
installed apps like LibreOffice that have a bunch of separate packages 
to upgrade ...

I like the "-d" trick, will have to try that. Although it's been awhile 
since I had a problem with unmet dependencies using Aptosid. They have 
their own repository of some things and seem to be vetting Sid packages 
and filtering out ones that are problematic.

Aptosid also recommends getting to run level 2 before doing an upgrade of X.

Best advice before any upgrade: make a system disk image and save it 
somewhere! :-)

-- 
David
gn...@hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://clanjones.org/david/
http://dancing-treefrog.deviantart.com/

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