[Solved] Debian stable on recent hardware

[llivv]

are you sudo -i before trying to write to /etc/apt?

I'm able to write to the sources.liist
I'd suggest you keep you eye on top while you are adding packages.
Both normal and live debian systems have a habit of holding memory once it has been used.
freeing memory after closing a program doesn't happen very often. AFAICT
kmathern - are you thinking to try reloading the edit: radeon module?
I've forgotten the squence.
I think it's just simple modprobe radeon then restart xserver.

my 10 year old i915g is struggling with the Live KDE, I think Live Gnome
might be a bit less laggy but not enough. So I'm grabbing Xfce now and thinking
about 4 1GB ddr pc3200 so I can actually play a bit with the Live systems.

[kmathern]

are you sudo -i before trying to write to /etc/apt?

I'm able to write to the sources.liist
I'd suggest you keep you eye on top while you are adding packages.
Both normal and live debian systems have a habit of holding memory once it has been used.
freeing memory after closing a program doesn't happen very often. AFAICT
kmathern - are you thinking to try loading the radeon module if it's available?

Yes, I was thinking of trying to use modprobe to load it. The module probably wouldn't load earlier because the firmware was missing. I think you might need to load it with X shutdown. Btw, I'm kind of using the following as a guide: http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonBuildHowTo# ... on_startup

[ShoshannahBenladen]

Ok that did the trick, I now have the correct resolution.

So basically I did what I did until now, except after stopping gdm I removed the drm and radeon modules using the procedure described in your link, then reloaded them and restarted X, and now it works.
Gnome looks pretty different too, btw.

A couple of remarks :
- before I used sudo su and I could not edit sources.list. Using sudo -i it worked.
- apt-get update fetched more than a thousand files after that.
- one must first remove the radeon module, then drm. If you just copy/paste what's in the X wiki ("modprobe -r -v drm radeon") it does not work.

Anyway, now how do I upgrade from squeeze to wheezy ?
Will a simple sed -i -e 's/squeeze/wheezy/g' sources.list work ?

[kmathern]

Ok that did the trick, I now have the correct resolution.

So basically I did what I did until now, except after stopping gdm I removed the drm and radeon modules using the procedure described in your link, then reloaded them and restarted X, and now it works.
Gnome looks pretty different too, btw.

A couple of remarks :
- before I used sudo su and I could not edit sources.list. Using sudo -i it worked.
- apt-get update fetched more than a thousand files after that.
- one must first remove the radeon module, then drm. If you just copy/paste what's in the X wiki ("modprobe -r -v drm radeon") it does not work.

Anyway, now how do I upgrade from squeeze to wheezy ?
Will a simple sed -i -e 's/squeeze/wheezy/g' sources.list work ?

Okay, you've now proven to yourself that it will work with Wheezy if you have the firmware installed.

As for upgrading from squeeze to wheezy, how much do you have invested in your squeeze install? It might be easier to just do a fresh install of wheezy. There's an upgrade guide here: http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/ ... ng.en.html. I'm not sure if the guide is 100% complete/correct because Wheezy is still the "testing" release (though it is getting pretty close to being the "stable" release). If you do try the upgrade and some problems come up I would open a new topic.

[ShoshannahBenladen]

Well, what took me some time what backuping my old PC, and then solving this x.org problem, the rest of the install took under an hour, including downloading the iso.
So, on to a fresh install of wheezy then

Anyway, I wanted to thank all of you for your time and for the stellar support you provided !
I can only wish the companies I have to deal with at work were this competent and reactive.

[llivv]

if you could edit the title of the first post adding (SOLVED)
it would be helpful to other having a similar issue in the future.

Yes, I thought gnome might look a bit different for you.

and the wheezy KDE Live DVD is showing 131 upgradable packages today.
This is normal for testing. And you don't have to upgrade packages if you just want to install something else. apt takes care of the heavy lifting for you.

[ShoshannahBenladen]

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of how it looks now btw
Anyway, I changed the title, and now on to finding why git won't honor my user.mail setting ..

[llivv]

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of how it looks now btw
Anyway, I changed the title, and now on to finding why git won't honor my user.mail setting ..

I noticed in one of your early posts you mentioned you didn't need 3D graphics support
and you just wanted to get stable squared away - iirc,
I'm not a fan of the big environments either but gnome is still debian default and gets the most exposure.
If your not happy with the new gnome look I'd recommend you take a look at the HowTo section.
Now that you know how the debian default looks, you have a strong starting point to work from.

Thank you for marking this Topic as Solved.

[ShoshannahBenladen]

Don't worry, that's not a problem at all - I can always install wmaker, blackbox or something like that.

Just one last question, I installed wheezy from the ISO which was recommended here, and afterwards while installing software I noticed some packages were pulled from sid.

Sources.list looks just normal (to my eyes anyway):

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$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
$

However I also found this :

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$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sid.list 
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ sid main
$

Is this normal/needed ?

[cynwulf]

However I also found this :

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$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sid.list 
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ sid main
$

Is this normal/needed ?

No it's not normal - you must have created it... beware when copying and pasting commands from dubious howtos, blogs, etc...

The presence of the unstable repo means that you will soon be running unstable rather than testing, if that is not the case already. Do you have any kind of pinning set up / default release set?

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$ cat /etc/apt/apt.conf

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$ cat /etc/apt/preferences

If you want to find out what was upgraded to sid versions of packages, there are various ways of doing this, you could examine the logs or you could take the easy way out and use synaptic (which can list packages by origin). Or this kind of method: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... 07#p407226

[llivv]

However I also found this :

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$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sid.list 
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ sid main
$

Is this normal/needed ?

I believe cynwulf is correct,
but if you didn't add that file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d please give to link to the image you downloaded and used for that iinstall.

[ShoshannahBenladen]

I'm positive I did not add this file or copy/pasted cr*p from the internet.
Plus I only noticed packages coming on from sid this morning, it was fine until then.

The two mentionned files are empty.

The ISO I used is the following (from my other computer download directory) :
debian-wheezy-live-b4-amd64-gnome-desktop.iso
MD5 07304a32c03bb777da49abab4705f0aa

[kmathern]

Before you get too upset I would check to see what (if any) packages are installed from the sid repo.

Install apt-show-versions

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apt-get install apt-show-versions

Run apt-show-versions and grep on "/sid uptodate" (this will show sid packages if the sid repo is still enabled)

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apt-show-versions | grep "/sid uptodate"

If you've already disabled or removed the sid repo, grep on "installed: No available version in archive\|newer than version in archive". It will show installed packages not from any currently enabled repo (like the sid repo)

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apt-show-versions | grep "installed: No available version in archive\|newer than version in archive"

fwiw, I find apt-show-versions a lot easier to use than using aptitude's search

[cynwulf]

The ISO I used is the following (from my other computer download directory) :
debian-wheezy-live-b4-amd64-gnome-desktop.iso
MD5 07304a32c03bb777da49abab4705f0aa

Which is legit: http://live.debian.net/cdimage/release/ ... id/MD5SUMS

I can't imagine that file would have been included in the installation. Check the time stamp for when it was created, search your normal user's and root's .bash_history files for any references to it, etc...

I would guess that you followed some tutorial or other where you ran something like e.g.

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# echo deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ sid main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sid.list

?

[ShoshannahBenladen]

I am not upset, sorry if I gave you that impression.

Basically I installed squeeze and tried to get it to work, before I abandonned and posted here.
After the successful installation and reload of the graphics driver in a live wheezy image, I proceeded to install that image.
After the installation I did not touch any apt settings at all (except adding non-free to sources.list of course).

Regarding sid.list, I commented the only line it contains when I discovered it, so unfortunately stat does not give any useful information.

However I installed apt-show-versions like you suggested and here is what I got :

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$ apt-show-versions | grep "installed: No available version in archive\|newer than version in archive"| wc -l
304
$

Nice, huh ? In this list are also some pretty fundamental packages, like grub or libc.

Anyway, let's proceed :

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$ apt-show-versions | grep "installed: No available version in archive\|newer than version in archive"| grep grub
grub-common 1.99-27 newer than version in archive
grub-pc 1.99-27 newer than version in archive
grub-pc-bin 1.99-27 newer than version in archive
grub2-common 1.99-27 newer than version in archive
$ dpkg -L grub2-common
[..]
/usr/sbin/update-grub
[..]
$ stat /usr/sbin/update-grub
  File: ‘/usr/sbin/update-grub’
  Size: 64        	Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 801h/2049d	Inode: 11464208    Links: 1
Access: (0755/-rwxr-xr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2013-02-03 17:56:52.000000000 +0100
Modify: 2013-01-20 18:51:51.000000000 +0100
Change: 2013-02-03 17:56:36.000000000 +0100
 Birth: -
$

So, my conclusion would be that this "newer than wheezy" package was created during the installation of the wheezy live image.

Of course if you have a better explanation I'm all ears

[kmathern]

I'm pretty sure the wheezy Live image (DVD/USB etc.) would have installed only wheezy version packages.

There's not much of a difference in versions in your grub-common example, "-26" for the wheezy version versus "-27 " for the sid version.

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$ apt-cache policy grub-common
grub-common:
  Installed: 1.99-27
  Candidate: 1.99-27
  Version table:
 *** 1.99-27 0
        500 http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ sid/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.99-26 0
        500 http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy/main i386 Packages

It was probably installed during a upgrade/dist-upgrade before you were aware that the sid repo was in your sources (and enabled).

Btw, my thinking is that most of your 304 sid packages will eventually find there way into the wheezy repos, or end up being replaced by higher versioned wheezy packages. {run that apt-show-versions command every now and then, you should see the count go down over time}

[ShoshannahBenladen]

That's what I'm hoping too, but I'm still a little bit disappointed at myself, whatever happened here.
Anyway, thanks for everything, I am very satisfied with what I have right now, the computer and the apps run stable and this is all I wanted

[fsmithred]

I just got burned by this sid.list problem. Back at the end of January, I made a wheezy-kde installation in virtualbox, with the intent of making a live-iso for a friend (using refractasnapshot). The debian install was from debian-wheezy-live-b4-i386-kde-desktop. Made the iso, installed the system onto his computer (using refractainstaller) and all was well. He's been doing updates every time the update notifier tells him to, and there have been no problems until yesterday, when the system blew up and kde got removed.

Sure enough, my iso has /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sid.list in it, and I'm sure I did not add that file. If I install the system from the live iso in vbox and run an update and upgrade, I end up with /etc/issue telling me I'm running jessie/sid, even though only wheezy sources are specified in sources.list.

[ShoshannahBenladen]

Just as a sidenote, I ended up doing a full reinstall (separate partition for /home, nothing special in /etc, just backed-up the output of dpkg -l before doing it, so no hassle) using a newer (but still pre-relase) wheezy ISO, and did not have this problem any more.