Matthew's Journal

Systemd is in many ways an improvement over System V init (sysvinit), but I worry about the direction it seems to be going in (and how upstream interact with folk), and I think distributions need to work a bit harder to preserve user choice in this area. ISTM there is space for a more tightly-focused new init system.( Read more... )

I upgraded ming, my home desktop and server machine. Upgrades are often a bit tricky on ming, as it is in some sense the system I first installed in around 1998 or so. That said, things mostly worked, although I ended up with udev installed (which I've now removed again, as it led to confusing error message). Something is still complaining during bootup, but I can't find a log of the failure (it's one of the init scripts that runs before syslog starts).

More annoyingly, VM is buggered. emacs complains it can't find vm, even if I cd to the relevant directory and run it from there. xemacs21's VM (which the other account uses for reasons I can't remember) is also buggered, but it's barfing inside the VM start-up. That's quite annoying.

Also, ntpdate runs before bind, which means it can't resolve any of the time-servers...

I upgraded my work desktop (a MacPro) to Lenny today. Ignoring kernel questions for now, it was less satisfactory an experience than I would have liked. This was an upgrade of a reasonably recent etch desktop, kept up-to-date. By now, you really ought to be able to make this sort of upgrade Just Work, without faffing around.

It didn't work; I followed the instructions in the release notes, but the initial aptitude upgrade, after thinking for a very long time, announced it couldn't solve the dependancies. At this point, the release notes are silent. I managed to get it working, by variously removing or installing the troublesome packages, but really. What's a normal user going to do at this point?

A smaller grumble is that aptitude upgrade is apparantly deprecated, so you get a warning from aptitude every time you use that command. That's really really sloppy.

The point of voting on fucking interminable general resolutions was to STOP the bloody flamewars! It's annoying enough that the Forces of Light lost, without having another flamewar about the SAME FUCKING ISSUES!

It appears that Debian is going to vote for a resolution that isn't even grammatical (see point B) :(

Well, I upgraded ming my house server to debian stable this evening; the aim being to get the disruption over with before atreic gets back. Mostly, things went smoothly, which isn't bad given this machine hasn't been re-installed from scratch since about 1998. It needs more disk desperately, though.

Annoyances include the loss of disorder (I'll build a new one, I guess), the new apache configuration not checking what modules might actually be necessary, and the fact that my X setup is probably utterly doomed - fvwm and xplanet are not backwards-compatibly changed :(

Before I upgrade rapun, I have to note that the gnus upgrade is going to break everyone's gnus configuration (mine included).

Finally, ess and xemacs21-mule won't configure...

So, as long as I can sort my X config before the xserver next dies, it should all be well...

I should note that I edited apt.conf to add:
APT::Cache-Limit "10000000";

and ran aptitude with the PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1 environment variable.

Everything else was pretty much as per the docs.

ETA: ess was due to me still having emacs19 installed
More annoying is that ntp and inn both have changed their config-file sufficiently that things don't work as before unless you change your config file. The upgrade process should tell you this, IMAO