Do I stay or do I go (too many questions)

[Jonny87]

I changed to Debian Lenny within the last week in hopes to try something new. I had heard some good stuff about Debian and thought it would be worth a try. I started my Linux life with Puppy Linux changing to Linux Mint and then Ubuntu until just recently. Had no reason to leave Ubuntu except that my HDD went bung and had to start from scratch so though it was time for a change so hence my move to Debian.
On changing to Debian I liked the fact that it was known for it's stability, and I still do. At the time it didn't bother me that some of the software may be slightly out of date, I was willing to have slightly out of date software and a system that works.
However I guess I didn't realize what I was in for, it seems that system was more out of date than I expected. This has caused me a couple headaches with drives in an unsupported file-system and the odd issue here and there. I would be lying if I said I haven't though about going back to Ubuntu, I've found it stable and problem free. Though I don't like to give up that easily. And I've just got Lenny set up the way I want and networking as a small server to two other computers in my home. I have since installed the backport source and installed the latest kernel that I could find;

Linux 2.6.32-bpo.5-686 (i686)

I have also managed to get my drives working for the most part (still having the odd issue due to the file system).
In saying this I still feel like my system is too outdated i.e. openoffice.org 2.4 etc. So I'm presented with these questions;

1) Is Squeeze stable enough for every day use? if so;
a) How up to date is it?
b) Is there an easy way to upgrade to it with out losing my configuration?

2) Is there an easy way to get Lenny more up to date with out messing with too much and making it unstable?

3) Would I be better off changing back to Ubuntu?

Please note I'm not knocking Debian, on the contrary, as I said I like the fact that its known for it's stability. And in that respect it's been great for me, I'm just on the quest to learn what I can about Linux and find the perfect distro for my needs (if such a thing exists).

Sorry for the long post. Any advice would be appreciated.

P.S.
I don't mind learning any technical or command line stuff if someone is willing and patient enough to tech me what I don't know.

[thewanderer]

I've been running Squeeze on this laptop for several months already, and on the previous one - since it became testing. It is quite stable, yet you have to pay attention every now and then when the system complains. I see no breakage happening in general, and besides a few minor bugs (compiling a new kernel as I type, hoping they all go away) it is ready for daily use. Just do read the documentation before and after installing any packages.

a) How up to date is it?

Just enough. I never see myself too far behind the mainstream developments when running Squeeze.

b) Is there an easy way to upgrade to it with out losing my configuration?

Depending on your setup, it might be easy or not. Generally, I've never had any problems with Debian upgrades (contrary to Ubuntu), but backing up all your config files to a safe place and reading all warnings that appear on the screen is a must. Ignore a single one, and you might end up toast (you, not the PC...).

2) Is there an easy way to get Lenny more up to date with out messing with too much and making it unstable?

No. At least if you don't want to build your own packages, but that is a kind of fun for the strong of heart.

3) Would I be better off changing back to Ubuntu?

I don't think so. I've been running Debian for about five years and it has never let me down, and the beginning was not as mellow as it is for newcomers today. I started out with an unofficial release (3.1) for amd64, because at the time there was no official 64-bit release, and went off without functioning sound and with a slightly broken GNOME. But somehow KDE appealed to me and it worked rather nice. I did struggle for some time, then with Debian 4.0 things got better as we saw an official amd64 build, and since then there were no problems for me. Heck, I did manage to pull it off with testing until it became Debian 4. The best time was during a freeze.
Now, Debian Testing is also nearing a freeze, so things start to look super-stable. Welcome aboard.

[craigevil]

Openoffice 3.2 is in backports.

Backports.org package search http://www.backports.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=packages

testing is more than stable enough.

To upgrade from stable to testing:
Remove any APT source specific to stable (such as volatile), then s/lenny/squeeze/ on your sources.list and then
aptitude update && aptitude install aptitude linux-image-`uname -r | sed 's,.*-,,'` ; reboot; aptitude safe-upgrade && aptitude full-upgrade. Important: see <squeeze udev>.

As of <udev> 150 in squeeze, Linux kernel 2.6.27 or newer is required (i.e. upgrade kernel and udev at the same time).
If udev installation fails and you already have a squeeze kernel installed, then reboot into the new kernel and "aptitude -f install ; aptitude safe-upgrade" to continue. See also http://bugs.debian.org/571255

[Jonny87]

Depending on your setup, it might be easy or not. Generally, I've never had any problems with Debian upgrades (contrary to Ubuntu), but backing up all your config files to a safe place and reading all warnings that appear on the screen is a must. Ignore a single one, and you might end up toast (you, not the PC...).

I have it set up on a 320 HDD with it split in multiple partitions (/, /var, /usr, /home, etc), I let it partition it, partition it's self on installation. What config files specifically would need to to be backed up? Anthing outside of home?

To upgrade from stable to testing:
Remove any APT source specific to stable (such as volatile), then s/lenny/squeeze/ on your sources.list and then
aptitude update && aptitude install aptitude linux-image-`uname -r | sed 's,.*-,,'` ; reboot; aptitude safe-upgrade && aptitude full-upgrade. Important: see <squeeze udev>.

As of <udev> 150 in squeeze, Linux kernel 2.6.27 or newer is required (i.e. upgrade kernel and udev at the same time).
If udev installation fails and you already have a squeeze kernel installed, then reboot into the new kernel and "aptitude -f install ; aptitude safe-upgrade" to continue. See also http://bugs.debian.org/571255

Could you perhaps go over that again in a more step by step process? I got that I had to remove Lenny sources and add the squeeze sources, just slightly confused on the rest.

[craigevil]

Remove any lenny sources i.e. backports,volatile, etc. Change the debian lenny line to squeeze then do:

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aptitude update && aptitude install aptitude linux-image-`uname -r | sed 's,.*-,,'`

that installs the kernel from squeeze
reboot
upgrade everything else to testing

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aptitude safe-upgrade && aptitude full-upgrade

[Jonny87]

Thanks, is there a way to know how much the down load will be?
I'm almost out of quoter for the month so if its going to be to much I'll wait till next month.

[Absent Minded]

if you use aptitude in interactive mode, once you have selected your updates and press "g" (for get) it will tell you how much has to be downloaded. It may do this just on the command line running "aptitude safe-upgrade" as well, I just don't remember for sure at the moment. You "might" want to update the kernel first. I have seen some posts claiming it is required for the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze. Not that I have been looking (I normally just do a full install of Squeeze and not upgrades from Lenny) but I haven't read anything official on that.

[oOarthurOo]

I haven't seen anything from OP to suggest a need for squeeze. Once he gets backported kernel his ext4 drives are supported. Once he gets openoffice from backports, that complaint is done. I'd recommend just taking from backports until release notes are complete about the upgrade from lenny to squeeze.

[Jonny87]

if you use aptitude in interactive mode, once you have selected your updates and press "g" (for get) it will tell you how much has to be downloaded.

Thanks but I'm looking to know how much it will be before I download them, is there a way to find this out?

[thewanderer]

Call aptitude with the --simulate flag, it works like this:

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$ aptitude --simulate safe-upgrade

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information... Done
Initializing package states... Done       
Reading task descriptions... Done  
Resolving dependencies...
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  baobab{a} empathy-common{a} gnome-dictionary{a} gnome-screenshot{a} 
  [...]
The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed:
  apt-xapian-index aptitude-doc-cs aptitude-doc-en aptitude-doc-es 
  [...]
350 packages upgraded, 23 newly installed, 27 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 484MB of archives. After unpacking 411kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
Would download/install/remove packages.

You can use this trick to see how much data you have to download and also allocate on your hard disk.

If it's about making a backup, try this:

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cd /
tar cjpf etcbackup.tar.bz2 /etc

And you get /etcbackup.tar.bz2 which you should move to your home directory, root's directory or just leave there in case your other filesystems might screw up and refuse to mount (just paranoid :P ).

[widz]

I haven't seen anything from OP to suggest a need for squeeze. Once he gets backported kernel his ext4 drives are supported. Once he gets openoffice from backports, that complaint is done. I'd recommend just taking from backports until release notes are complete about the upgrade from lenny to squeeze.

I second that. Why bother with squeeze?

[jhsu]

Given that you're satisfied with Ubuntu, I think you should stick with that as your main distro. However, you could dual-boot Ubuntu and Debian or run Debian through Virtualbox within Ubuntu.

[craigevil]

Why bother with stable?

Why go to all the trouble of looking in backports? Very few packages are actually in the backports repo.

So what do they try next? So what is the next suggestion; either backport it from sid or install from source. Neither one of which a newbie knows how to do.

Running 'stable' on a desktop or laptop is a joke unless your system is ancient.

Look through the mailing-list or lurk in #debian more people have trouble running 'stable' or testing than sid. Usually because either a package is not in stable or a package was removed from testing.

Why bother to wait an hour for Debian to install just to find out a driver you need is not in stable? I have seen several posts where someone needed/wanted the latest stable kernel, and guess what the answer was "compile it yourself". And people wonder why Ubuntu is so popular.

My solution:
Download and install sidux, the install takes 5 minutes. Next install a Debian kernel and a liquorix kernel. Then download smxi and exoodles, Run smxi to update and to install nvidia/ati if needed, then run exoodles to install all the nifty multimedia stuff . Last remove most of the sidux cruft other than the manual which actually contains useful info. Ten minutes of work including the install and you have a working Debian sid install with an updated kernel and all the multimedia stuff installed.