I broke the internet (aka sunrat migrates to Debian Stable)

[sunrat]

For some reason I haven't discovered yet, last night full-upgrade of siduction caused networking to fail. It seems to connect to the router but DNS is not working. Probably my fault. I broke PulseAudio last week but fixed that.

I've been threatening myself for several years to try running Debian Stable instead but always found a reason to stick with siduction. You know, just one last application that's not available in Stable yet. But this might be it. I can't think of anything I use that's not in Buster.

So I've set up Firefox, created a Firefox account so I can Sync with the other system that still currently has siduction, and am now posting from Buster! Now to get Thunderbird set up and hopefully I can just copy over the profile. This will be hard as I've used siduction/aptosid/sidux for at least twelve years. The current install is 3 years old and has suffered much tweaking, not all of it good.

I hope I will enjoy leaving the life of eternal upgrades behind.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

You're getting old. Time to get away from that volatile stuff and settle down for something a bit more staid and stable.

[securitybreach]

8 minutes ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

You're getting old. Time to get away from that volatile stuff and settle down for something a bit more staid and stable.

 

Like Archlinux

[Hedon James]

Well, you're making me feel a whole lot better about my recent decision to migrate to Debian Stable.  I've been on a quest for a rolling release distro, and I've been mostly pleased with Siduction and Sparky, but when something hiccups, it's just a huge PITA.  I dont care about the latest & greatest software, as I don't feel I'm missing any features in the software I use.  So for me, it's about breaking the cycle of Lubuntu LTS re-installation every 2 years.  But the trade-off for never having to reinstall again is being constantly on edge, and aware, of every update/upgrade.

 

So I decided to look into the longest "support" window I could find, sticking with my old & familiar apt-foo.  And it looks like Debian Stable is that beast, with the added bonus of "rock solid", with an approximately 5+/- year support window.  I think I read that some linux server distros have 10-year support.  I might look into that, and add my desktop GUI.  Are there any desktop distros that offer MORE than 5 year support windows?  I'm not aware of any, but ears are open if I'm wrong.

 

I figure that if I can get ONE distro-upgrade out of it, my hardware will be 10-15 years old, and probably time to upgrade hardware again.  On paper, that sounds ideal....hoping that reality delivers on the promise of the ideality.

[sunrat]

This system is 12 years old! well, some of it. Core2Duo E8500 but SSD and 2 HDs, graphics card, RAM, PS are all newer.

Progress report - Thunderbird set up and working just by copying profile. Most visual tweaks done such as fonts and themes. Repos set up and working including one for Strawberry music player. A few more applications installed and Ktorrent working. Syncthing is probably the next and last major config left to do. This was a minimal netinstall so I have avoided having lots of applications which I never use like siduction had as that was a full install. It's quite refreshing to have it so lean, only 5.9GiB so far of which 841MiB is /home.

I was really looking forward to Plasma 5.18 after seeing some of the nice new features and improvements in the works - https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17.90.php

But I guess it will be in Bullseye when that is released next year-ish.

I won't be removing my siduction installs though. Need to ween myself off gradually.

[saturnian]

Wow, 12 years! Well, I'll stick with my approach -- running a rolling-release distro (Arch) and also running  Debian Stable. It still kinda surprises me how "stable" Arch can be, but after all this time I still feel better having Stable available, just in case.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

2 minutes ago, sunrat said:

Core2Duo

 

This was a great little CPU. I first experienced one of these in a Dell laptop that Josh gave to me a few years ago. Man, would that thing just screamed running Slackware. The LCD took a poop on me, though. I could run it with ext. monitor, but I eventually scrapped it for parts. Sad.

 

Oh, it was a Dell Latitude:

 

[saturnian]

1 hour ago, sunrat said:

I won't be removing my siduction installs though. Need to ween myself off gradually.

 

Maybe keep at least one. Debian Stable is kinda boring, ha-ha.

[sunrat]

Sometimes things are just harder than one expects.

I spent hours today, got Debian Buster configured nicely and then the desktop froze completely. I had installed Nvidia drivers ages ago to fix one issue but remembered my GTX560 Ti doesn't play nice with them. So I went back to siduction and found the networking was failing because of broken ufw. I didn't work out why it was broken but purging it enabled internet once more.

Then back to Debian and purged Nvidia drivers and back to Nouveau. So now both siduction and Debian are working sweetly! Way too much time on this but it was worth it. Time for (late) dinner and TV.

[saturnian]

sunrat, are you also running MX Linux still?

[raymac46]

When I got my Thinkpad and blew off Windows, the first thing I did was install Debian stable. I have since upgraded when Buster became the new stable. No reinstall needed.

I added a few tweaks like Dash to Dock to make it easy for my wife (we take the Thinkpad on holiday.)

Debian required a wire for installation because the Intel wifi wouldn't work without the non-free firmware. It does as soon as you install the needed packages.

I suppose I could have gone with Mint to avoid all the hassle but after a while Mint is B-O-R-I-N-G. I like Debian with GNOME and a few tweaks.

[saturnian]

This might be helpful to someone: For my most recent Stable installation, I used firmware-10.1.0-amd64-netinst.iso. They have the current "Unofficial non-free images including firmware packages" here: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/

[securitybreach]

Nice

[V.T. Eric Layton]

5 hours ago, sunrat said:

my GTX560 Ti

 

Hey! That's the same card I have in my machine. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get full monitor resolution with Nouveau. Of course, I haven't really tried to hard, either.

[sunrat]

9 hours ago, saturnian said:

sunrat, are you also running MX Linux still?

 

Yes it's on my other system but it only gets booted rarely. I just like to follow it's progress as the devs and community are great but it has strayed to far from KISS. All the MX utilities are nice for n00 new explorers but I do most of that stuff in CLI.

I do always use the Debian iso with non-free firmware. Saves a bit of hassle.

 

7 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

 

Hey! That's the same card I have in my machine. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get full monitor resolution with Nouveau. Of course, I haven't really tried to hard, either.

 

That's exactly why I installed the Nvidia drivers. GTX560 Ti doesn't support 4k so I had to run it at 1920x1080. Initial Debian install displayed at 3840x1080 with Nouveau (ie. letterbox) on my 4k monitor but was correct with Nvidia but then I got occasional freeze. After purging Nvidia, Nouveau worked at the correct resolution. Go figure! I'm sure there must be a way to tweak with Nouveau but I never found it.

Removing Nvidia wasn't straight forward. I had to make a list of all installed nvidia components and then use awk to strip only package names, text editor to replace line breaks with spaces and remove the extraneous ":amd64", and then purge the resulting list. After reboot, Nouveau had correct resolution.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

42 minutes ago, sunrat said:

Removing Nvidia wasn't straight forward.

 

How did you install Nvidia in the first place? Just curious...

[sunrat]

2 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

 

How did you install Nvidia in the first place? Just curious...

 

apt install nvidia-legacy-390xx-driver

It's a metapackage that depends on all the other nvidia bits. Unfortunately removing it does not remove the other bits.

For posterity I post here how to remove.

First list all nvidia packages:

dpkg -l |grep nvidia >nvidia-pkgs

Reformat that list to syntax apt will understand;

awk '{print $2}' nvidia-pkgs |tr '\n' ' ' |sed 's/:amd64//g' >nvidia-pkgs-apt

Remove all packages with apt:

apt purge glx-alternative-nvidia libegl-nvidia-legacy-390xx0 libgl1-nvidia-legacy-390xx-glvnd-glx libgles-nvidia-legacy-390xx1 libgles-nvidia-legacy-390xx2 libglx-nvidia-legacy-390xx0 libnvidia-legacy-390xx-cfg1 libnvidia-legacy-390xx-eglcore libnvidia-legacy-390xx-glcore libnvidia-legacy-390xx-ml1 nvidia-detect nvidia-egl-common nvidia-installer-cleanup nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-legacy-390xx-alternative nvidia-legacy-390xx-driver nvidia-legacy-390xx-driver-bin nvidia-legacy-390xx-driver-libs nvidia-legacy-390xx-egl-icd nvidia-legacy-390xx-kernel-dkms nvidia-legacy-390xx-kernel-support nvidia-legacy-390xx-vdpau-driver nvidia-legacy-390xx-vulkan-icd nvidia-modprobe nvidia-persistenced nvidia-settings-legacy-390xx nvidia-support nvidia-vulkan-common xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-legacy-390xx

Then reboot and it should be using Nouveau.

Theoretically one should be able to pipe the list to apt or use process substitution but it didn't work first try and I'd run out of patience to find the right syntax so just copied the whole list to the apt command.