upgrade method.

[rayandrews]

All:

So, although I'm quite happy with Bullseye I'm thinking to upgrade. Best to do a fresh install, or can I just change the tracked distro in 'sources.list'?

BTW, will Bookworm still permit a LILO boot? GRUB is the sort of impenetrable, bloated monster that I try to avoid if I can. When I upgraded last time, I was pleased to see that I could uninstall GRUB, and use LILO still -- one executable, and one config file, in my /boot directory. Simple, and it does everything I need, namely boot my system.

[sunrat]

Read and follow the release notes section on upgrading - Upgrades from Debian 11 (bullseye)

[rayandrews]

Thanks. Pretty complicated. Maybe a fresh install would be easiest. But what about LILO?

[lindi]

Debian bullseye does not include lilo. Neither does bookworm. https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=lilo

[rayandrews]

Ah, but it still works! I'm just wondering if the day will come when it no longer works at all. Difficult question probably, maybe I'll just have to take my chances. You guys were wrong to remove it, it's what Linux was always supposed to be -- simple and functional. It does one thing and does it well. When I want to mirror my install to another disk I have a single file to edit, then run LILO and it's all done.

[sunrat]

Thanks. Pretty complicated. Maybe a fresh install would be easiest. But what about LILO?

It's not complicated. Just read it to be aware of what can happen but mostly it will go smoothly.
The main considerations are that any 3rd party repos may not be compatible, and the new non-free-firmware section of the repo.

I did it myself; it can't be that hard!

You guys were wrong to remove it

There are no "you guys" here, this is a user forum.

[Fossy]

I did it myself; it can't be that hard! ... ( sic erat scriptum ) ...

[rayandrews]

Geez. It seemed to be going ok, but I got this msg:

Errors were encountered while processing:
/tmp/apt-dpkg-install-BO2NIo/08-nvidia-legacy-check_525.147.05-7~deb12u1_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Also, during the upgrade I got a message to the effect that my video card required the legacy driver but it sounded like this would be handled ok.

... I presumed that wouldn't be a critical error so I continued.
I soldiered on bravely but she wouldn't reboot past console. For one thing the kernel is stil 5.10, and in the syslog:

Mar 12 20:18:55 b6-12-Deb11b systemd[1]: Starting D-Bus System Message Bus...
Mar 12 20:18:55 b6-12-Deb11b systemd[562]: dbus.service: Failed to locate executable /usr/bin/dbus-daemon: No such file or directory

... so I'm back here with my backup of bullseye. I see that in /usr/bin (of the attempted upgrade) there are no dbus* files at all! And it won't connect to the internet so a repair sounds difficult. But if I can grab what I might be missing via this working backup, and copy it over to the broken upgrade, maybe I can get her fired up? Perhaps download the above .deb, copy it over and try to run it? Perhaps copy all the dbus* files over and try again?

[sunrat]

So what graphics card do you have? You can run nvidia-detect which will recommend which driver should be installed.
I have no idea about the dbus issue, /usr/bin/dbus-daemon is present on my system. Checking apt history log it was installed when I did

Code: Select all

apt full-upgrade

Did you run that command? The file does not appear to be present in Bullseye.

[rayandrews]

0 /root/Desktop 1 % nvidia-detect
Detected NVIDIA GPUs:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GK208B [GeForce GT 730] [10de:1287] (rev a1)

Checking card: NVIDIA Corporation GK208B [GeForce GT 730] (rev a1)
Your card is supported by all driver versions.
Your card is also supported by the Tesla 470 drivers series.
Your card is also supported by the Tesla 450 drivers series.
Your card is also supported by the Tesla 418 drivers series.
It is recommended to install the
nvidia-driver
package.

... so at lest bullseye is happy with my card.

0 /usr/bin 1 % l dbus* << think 'ls' there. Again, this is bullseye.

LISTING of "dbus*": All file types, INsensitive. Sorting upside down by: Mod. Time:

14472 [23-06-06--07:07] dbus-uuidgen*
14472 [23-06-06--07:07] dbus-update-activation-environment*
30856 [23-06-06--07:07] dbus-send*
14472 [23-06-06--07:07] dbus-run-session*
26768 [23-06-06--07:07] dbus-monitor*
244928 [23-06-06--07:07] dbus-daemon*
14472 [23-06-06--07:07] dbus-cleanup-sockets*

... is there some way to force an internet connection from console?

[rayandrews]

Nevermind, I did a virgin install and it's all there. Now, can I copy my old /home and /root to import my old settings?

[sunrat]

Nevermind, I did a virgin install and it's all there. Now, can I copy my old /home and /root to import my old settings?

You mean /etc, not /root. That's where global settings are. Obviously an in-place upgrade will replace some old settings. There's a good chance you may overwrite some new settings with old incompatible ones so it's probably best to selectively only copy over important settings. I had a couple of glitches from old settings. Also my custom DNS set in my router stopped working because upgrade installed a new file (dhclient.conf?) which I eventually found and removed to restore it.

[rayandrews]

Sweet, LILO works And yes I know I'm old fashioned, I like things that Just Work. Maybe when I have the interest I'll figure out how GRUB works.

[dlu2021]

FYI, if you are looking for an alternative to using grub, systemd-boot might be an option. It is simpler than grub, not sure how it compares to lilo though, I haven't ever used lilo. It is also limited to only supporting EFI systems. The systemd-boot package in bookworm auto configures itself during the install process:

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ ... stemd-boot

[KitchM]

My personal experience is to just back up everything, and then do a fresh install.

This gives a person a chance to reorganize their data and to move it to a drive that can be removed and kept out of the fresh install process.

This is probably a good opportunity to install Qubes first and then Debian in a secure container. Just an idea.