Lenny
 

Hi,

I read that Lenny will be released sometime in September this year.
I've been using Etch and am contemplating on moving to Lenny now instead.
How's usable is Lenny at the moment, in particular the Beta2 version
or should I wait till later.

Thanks.

Regards,

Daniel


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Lenny
 

On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 6:24 AM, Daniel Ngu <daniel.dy.ngu@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I read that Lenny will be released sometime in September this year.
> I've been using Etch and am contemplating on moving to Lenny now instead.
> How's usable is Lenny at the moment, in particular the Beta2 version
> or should I wait till later.

For me, more usable than Etch (Thinkpad T60). As always, it needs a
little tweak here, a little tweak there, but I'm more than happy with
it. If your harddrive is more than 40GB, you can very comfortably
dualboot (using 20GB for each install) so you can have 2 versions of
debian installed at the same time...

HTH


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Lenny
 

On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 07:24:40AM +0200, Daniel Ngu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I read that Lenny will be released sometime in September this year.
> I've been using Etch and am contemplating on moving to Lenny now instead.

There are some issues:

First off:
If you have a nvidia graphics card:
The nvidia-drivers haven't migrated to testing yet so if you play
tuxracer or gaze into the heavens with stellarium then you may want to
wait. See:

http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/169.12/README/appendix-a.html

or

http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-8776/README/appendix-a.html

to see what driver version supports your card. The names have changed
since Etch. For example, the 1.0-8776 driver was the one which supported
the MX400 graphics card, but it is now the 96.43.xx driver which
supports it - but is not yet in testing.

Secondly:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=479711
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=489132

If you are ok with dealing with that then I'd say go for it.

> How's usable is Lenny at the moment, in particular the Beta2 version
> or should I wait till later.

Hey, what's this Beta2 version business. You're not referring to the
Installer are you? You only need to install Debian once. To go from Etch
to Lenny is a simple edit of the /etc/apt/sources.lst and then use your
favourite package manager to update upgrade/dist-upgrade.

If you are running Testing/Lenny then you are basically acting as a
guinea pig so learn to use http://bugs.debian.org/

--
Chris.
======
"One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned
at the stake while the votes were being counted." -- Thomas B. Reed


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Lenny
 

Chris Bannister wrote:

On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 07:24:40AM +0200, Daniel Ngu wrote:

Hi,

I read that Lenny will be released sometime in September this year.
I've been using Etch and am contemplating on moving to Lenny now instead.


There are some issues:

First off:
If you have a nvidia graphics card:
The nvidia-drivers haven't migrated to testing yet so if you play
tuxracer or gaze into the heavens with stellarium then you may want to
wait. See:

http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/169.12/README/appendix-a.html

or

http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-8776/README/appendix-a.html

to see what driver version supports your card. The names have changed
since Etch. For example, the 1.0-8776 driver was the one which supported
the MX400 graphics card, but it is now the 96.43.xx driver which
supports it - but is not yet in testing.


Thanks - but this is just an AMD64 LAMP server (MySQL, Perl). There is
no graphic card stuff going on here.



Secondly:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=479711
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=489132

If you are ok with dealing with that then I'd say go for it.


That looks like issues with upgrades, am I right? I will be installing
from scratch if I do this (I'm changing the RAID config on this machine,
so it's a full re-install, which is why I'm considering doing this now).



How's usable is Lenny at the moment, in particular the Beta2 version
or should I wait till later.


Hey, what's this Beta2 version business. You're not referring to the
Installer are you? You only need to install Debian once. To go from Etch
to Lenny is a simple edit of the /etc/apt/sources.lst and then use your
favourite package manager to update upgrade/dist-upgrade.

If you are running Testing/Lenny then you are basically acting as a
guinea pig so learn to use http://bugs.debian.org/


Agreed - although I have never used the bug reporting for debian, it
would be good to know that.


I'm thinking one possible strategy for ameliorating risk here with
broken packages is to also install clean Lenny on my home workstation at
the same time (currently that also has Etch - I like to keep my dev
workstation and the prod server in sync as much as possible,
version-wise, so testing code is a bit more valid). So if I always make
sure to first do apt-get upgrade at home, to see if anything is
fundamentally broken, I should be able to avoid most of any really big
blow-ups in Lenny. The only real difference between dev and prod here is
that dev is i386 and prod is AMD64.


I've been running Lenny on my Eee PC 8G for the last couple of months,
and didn't have any problems at all. Lots of updates, of course, but
nothing seemed to break.


Does anybody have a handle on how much better MySQL and Perl versions
are going from Etch to Lenny? MySQL on Etch has occasionally gone into a
tailspin, presumably with a bad query that makes it eat CPU until I kill
it. Impossible to tell what the query was, since it only gets logged
after completion (and never completes). I'm also hoping the new version
in Lenny maybe has some bug fixes in there. And Perl 5.10 - if I'm doing
a clean install, not upgrade, any big gotchas in there with existing
code? I guess MySQL and Perl are the two really big ones. I currently
roll my own Apache 1.3 from source (eventually I'll learn about Apache 2
and upgrade my code).


Thanks again for the tips. Currently I'm inclined to just try this -
first on the home workstation, of course, then on the server if
everything appears to be working on dev.


Neil


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Lenny
 

On Sun, Jul 06, 2008 at 08:36:22AM -0500, Neil Gunton wrote:

>> If you are running Testing/Lenny then you are basically acting as a
>> guinea pig so learn to use http://bugs.debian.org/
>
> Agreed - although I have never used the bug reporting for debian, it would
> be good to know that.

Not only to report (though it would be nice of you to contribute), but
also to find out about known problems and possible workarounds.
Reporting is actually very easy to do with 'reportbug'.

> Thanks again for the tips. Currently I'm inclined to just try this -
> on the home workstation, of course, then on the server if everything
> appears to be working on dev.

Some more tips: you should install apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges and
also subscribe to debian-testing-security-announce (and
debian-security-announce if you haven't already). These are low traffic
mailing lists, so they will not take too much time to follow.

Regards,
Andrei
--
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)

Lenny
 

Neil Gunton wrote:


>> to see what driver version supports your card. The names have changed
>> since Etch. For example, the 1.0-8776 driver was the one which supported
>> the MX400 graphics card, but it is now the 96.43.xx driver which
>> supports it - but is not yet in testing.
>
> Thanks - but this is just an AMD64 LAMP server (MySQL, Perl). There is
> no graphic card stuff going on here.

I wouldn't. There's still plenty of time left for subtle changes that could
break stuff. Are you aware of backports? I know there's a mysql backport
for etch.

http://packages.debian.org/etch-backports/
http://www.backports.org/dokuwiki/doku.php

I generally wait until a couple point releases are out to upgrade a server.


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