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bullseye (testing)


saturnian

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Typing this from Debian Bullseye (testing), with GNOME. I did this installation a few days ago, and I'm just now getting around to setting things up.

 

I used debian-live-testing-amd64-gnome+nonfree.iso, found here: http://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/weekly-live-builds/amd64/iso-hybrid/

 

In the live session, in the Activities overview, there was an "Install Debian" icon, and I used that. It opened up the Calamares installer (!). I don't remember seeing that for installing Debian!

 

Anyway, at the boot screen before getting into the live session, there are the "Graphical Debian Installer" and "Debian Installer" options for users who prefer the "real" installer over Calamares. I ended up using Calamares, and I think that worked out fine.

 

I have Buster GNOME on another computer, but I'll probably wipe it out in a few weeks.

 

I prefer to use GNOME Shell without any extensions. I have the Workspace Indicator on the panel in Buster, but I'm thinking that I'll leave it off in Bullseye. I seem to get along fine between using Alt+Tab and the Activities overview. I understand that are some big changes (improvements?) coming in GNOME 40, but I should be good with gnome-shell 3.38 on this machine for the next couple of years.

 

Sadly, I don't see Nomacs in the Bullseye repos. I'll try to get it from Backports or something later.

 

Looks pretty good for Testing.

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I just did almost the same thing a couple of days ago! Used a netinstall image  then installed kde-plasma-desktop to have a minimal Plasma 5.20 and then added lots of audio production packages and some there essential (for me) packages and did some tweaking to make it more optimal for audio. This included a Liquorix kernel as the Debian one performed poorly using about double the DSP in a simple Mixbus session.. I even helped damentz, developer of Liquorix, fix a bug in OS version detection in the add-liquorix-repo.sh script which is the only documented way to install it on the Liquorix site. 🏆 (post prize to sunrat c/- Australia)

I love Plasma 5.20 (in a platonic way). It's been in siduction for several months now and has so many improvements over Buster's 5.14 that I didn't think would be profound but now I'm almost surprised how much better it all adds up too.

I intended this to be more a test distro-hopping kind of thing to test the waters but keep my Buster KDE studio install until Bullseye is actually released but it's been almost flawless for a couple of days so may now immediately replace the Buster one. I spent quite a few hours setting up a handful of third party repos and installing extra packages which aren't in Debian repos, plus building a few packages, so it's not worth repeating all that. Bullseye FTW! 👍😎

I finally documented the complete install process having failed to do it properly for Buster. Posted it in the Tips and Tricks section at https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&p=129234#p129234

@saturnian the Calamares installer is only available on the live image, and the full installer has more advanced options if one needs. netinstall image includes no desktop so enables a more minimal setup than the live image or the standard DVD images.

I had a look at nomacs - it's available in Buster and sid but not in testing. If you check its sid dependencies, some are missing so it would probably not be installable there anyway and would explain why it's missing in testing. https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=Nomacs

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I reinstalled using firmware-testing-amd64-netinst.iso and the resulting installation is less than half the size of what I ended up with first time around. That unofficial netinst firmware iso has become my preferred installation approach for Debian over the past several years.

 

I'm just about finished setting everything up (posting from Bullseye now). Haven't seen any real issues. I've installed "testing" before but I normally wait until it's hit that final freeze or whatever.

 

Chuckling to myself because this morning I'm running Bullseye GNOME on one laptop while using KDE Plasma from Kubuntu LTS on another one. As I mentioned in another thread here, the DE/WM doesn't matter so much to me, and I have different setups for different installations. I'm still not a big fan of Nautilus aka Files -- it's a good file manager but I always add Double Commander and use that instead (along with doing much of my file management from the command line).

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"Bullseye Freeze Timeline and Policy" - https://release.debian.org/bullseye/freeze_policy.html

 

With Buster, I think I did one installation after the testing freeze, and I did my other three Buster installations after the final release. I'll probably take the same approach with Bullseye. I don't anticipate any big problems at this point. I haven't run testing earlier in the process (before anything has been frozen), so maybe that's why it's been okay for me.

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Since I am not running Debian on any sort of mission-critical system (it's on my Thinkpad T430) I decided to do an upgrade. I did not reinstall, simply pointed my sources.list over to Bullseye. Everything went smoothly enough. I'll just watch the Debian weather before any further upgrading.

I had to reinstall a few packages that were held back and also fiddle around with my Gnome Shell Extensions, but now everything is tickety-boo.

Edited by raymac46
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I have done another Bullseye in-place upgrade. This time it was to my Debian LXQt install in VirtualBox. Everything went great - even the Guest Additions survived the upgrade. Posting from it now.

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Great to hear the upgrades went well. Debian usually create a lengthy upgrade guide for new versions when they are released but not so much for testing.

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Version upgrades are another way Linux has gotten better over the years. Back when I started in 2007, an in-place upgrade was Heartbreak Hotel. You really had no choice but to do a fresh install. There are still a few distros that I wouldn't try it with (looking at you, MX Linux) but the mainstream ones are no more risky than yer average rolling release now.

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I'm enjoying hearing about others' experiences upgrading Debian from Buster to Bullseye.  I'm currently on an up-to-date Buster installation (10.7 or 10.8?), having switched from the 'Buntu family in the last year.  Part of the reason for the switch from Lubuntu was their 3-year LTS, versus the expected 5-year +/- support window for Debian.  In-place upgrades for the 'Buntus were always a white knuckle affair for me, and I eventually learned that re-installation was the path of lesser resistance.  As much as I HATE reinstallation and re-customizing, a big part of the draw to Debian was the "upgrade when it's ready" ethos, and the represented "ease of upgrade" with minimal or NO issues.  And that's exactly what I'm hearing in this forum! 

 

Looks like I'm coming up on my first experience with a Debian upgrade?!!!  Out of curiousity, I'm wondering how you guys are upgrading Debian?  In the 'Buntus, there's a notification that a new version is available, with question of whether I want to "upgrade now", or "remind me later".  Is that how Debian does it too?  Can I wait for the notice, and play nice with the prompted recommendations?  Or does Debian do it differently?

 

And obviously, y'all aren't waiting for the Debian prompt, but initiating the upgrade yourselves.  How are you doing that?  I'm on a daily production machine, so I'm not interested in doing that; I'm perfectly content to wait for Debian to say "it's ready, go ahead and upgrade" (assuming Debian does that?).  But I'm interested in the knowledge of what you folks are doing to make that upgrade happen before Debian says it's fully baked and ready for consumption.  Care to enlighten me?

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@Hedon James no Debian won't give you a new version notification. Each version is typically supported for at least 5 years including LTS. You only get package upgrade notifications if you have a notifier installed such as Discover in KDE.

Debian announce a new version on debian-announce mailing list and after that it's usually all over the Linux news internet. And don't worry, I'll post a topic here when Bullseye is released unless someone else beats me to it. From past experience it's usually around 6 months after the soft freeze, which this time started on Feb 12.

If you want to do an in-place upgrade, just change your Debian sources from buster to bullseye, then:
 

apt update

apt full-upgrade

Happiness not guaranteed, but saturnian and raymac did it successfully. I did a fresh install because that's what I needed.

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26 minutes ago, sunrat said:

Happiness not guaranteed, but saturnian and raymac did it successfully. I did a fresh install because that's what I needed.

 

Nah, mine was a fresh installation. In fact, I have never done an in-place upgrade with Debian. I keep saying that I'm gonna do it ("next time") but then when the time comes it always seems like a better idea for me to just do a new installation.

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My upgrade went exactly as sunrat suggests. Since I intend to go on to the stable release I pointed my sources.list file to "Bullseye" from "Buster" (not '"testing" as that will get the new testing version when Bullseye is the stable version.)

I also added in a security repo for Bullseye but that is currently empty as the security team isn't supporting it yet. The path to this security repo is a bit different so comment out the old buster security path or delete it.

 

https://wiki.debian.org/Status/Testing

 

As stated above I had to rejig a few things in my Shell Extensions and reinstall 4 packages that didn't have the right dependencies so were held back. Buster will be around for some time so there's no rush to upgrade any mission-critical setup. Debian's in-place upgrade works well enough that I feel it is less hassle than reinstalling and rebuilding my data and configuration. Of course if you set up a separate data partition it probably doesn't matter.

Edited by raymac46
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I should also point out that my Debian install - while not mssion-critical - is not totally disposable either. It's on a Thinkpad that goes with my wife when she visits my daughter or her mother - so it has to work without any glitches. I have taken it along on holiday to stay connected and also back up my photos. Not doing that lately but I might in future. If I thought a full upgrade would totally bork things I wouldn't chance it. I upgraded before on this machine from Stretch to Buster.

Edited by raymac46
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As I noted earlier, Nomacs isn't available from the repos. A couple of other apps I like to add (Geeqie and ScreenGrab) don't work correctly under Wayland (they work fine in the Xorg session). No big deal, and so far I haven't found anything else to complain about. I've seen some older bug reports about Geeqie under Wayland.

 

For some reason, I enjoy the process of starting over with a fresh Debian installation every couple of years. But I'm glad there's an upgrade route that works for other users.

 

I think I'm gonna keep my other Debian installations on Buster until after Bullseye moves to Stable. Although my crusty old "test laptop" has Buster w/ LXQt (and Openbox); might be interesting to try an in-place upgrade to Testing on that one!

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13 hours ago, raymac46 said:

My upgrade went exactly as sunrat suggests. Since I intend to go on to the stable release I pointed my sources.list file to "Bullseye" from "Buster" (not '"testing" as that will get the new testing version when Bullseye is the stable version.)

I also added in a security repo for Bullseye but that is currently empty as the security team isn't supporting it yet. The path to this security repo is a bit different so comment out the old buster security path or delete it.

 

https://wiki.debian.org/Status/Testing

 

As stated above I had to rejig a few things in my Shell Extensions and reinstall 4 packages that didn't have the right dependencies so were held back. Buster will be around for some time so there's no rush to upgrade any mission-critical setup. Debian's in-place upgrade works well enough that I feel it is less hassle than reinstalling and rebuilding my data and configuration. Of course if you set up a separate data partiton it probably doesn't matter.

 

Thanks for the additional information.  I'm willing to give Debian's "upgrade in place" procedure a shot.  I gave the 'Buntus that shot, and learned that reinstallation was best.  I'll give Debian the same opportunity.  And my data is indeed on a separate partition(!), by design, for just such an unexpected emergency! 😎

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13 hours ago, raymac46 said:

I should also point out that my Debian install - while not mssion-critical - is not totally disposable either. It's on a Thinkpad that goes with my wife when she visits my daughter or her mother - so it has to work without any glitches. I have taken it along on holiday to stay connected and also back up my photos. Not doing that lately but I might in future. If I thought a full upgrade would totally bork things I wouldn't chance it. I upgraded before on this machine from Stretch to Buster.

 

This catches my eye to potentially solve a problem that has stumped me, that I can't google a solution for.  I have my custom Debian LXQT remix also installed on a laptop, connected to wifi via ConnMan.  Tested and verified to be working great at home.  I took my laptop on vacation to keep up with emails, work quotes, web surfing, etc... but it would NOT connect to my host's wifi network correctly.  Ran a few CLI incantations for troubleshooting, using my tablet, which connected to the host's network with no issues whatsoever.  Best I can tell, ConnMan was connected to the Local Network, but would not access the ISP Gateway. 

 

Are you using ConnMan, as the recommended network manager in LXQT?  If not, what are you using?  If so, may I assume your wife has NOT had those issues, or you certainly would've heard about it quickly?

 

I'm on Debian Buster (10.8?) with LXQT, using ConnMan and the CMST GUI (version 2019.01.13-1).  Not sure if there's an issue with that version, or whether I've got something bungled up somehow.  But for the life of me, I cannot understand how that laptop connects seamlessly via wifi at home, but refuses to connect to internet at any location OTHER than home (although it appears to connect to wifi LAN, but not WAN).  I've got to believe the issue is on my end, somehow, somewhere, but can't seem to find anything on the net that resembles my symptoms.  Any thoughts Ray?

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@HJ sorry can't help you there as I only use LXQt as an alternate "fun" desktop on the Thinkpad T430. Most of the time I run in GNOME and that is what my wife is used to (at least with a dock at the bottom of the screen.)

I have only used Network Manager which as we know has warts of its own. However I have never had trouble with wifi on the Thinkpad at least when on holiday. I take a small Ethernet cable along just in case there is a wired connection in the hotel room.
The only other place I use LXQt is in VBox which "fakes" a wired connection as you know.

Edited by raymac46
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^ that's actually somewhat helpful Ray.  while it doesnt help solve the problem, it does seem to confirm a problem with my ConnMan or my config (likely config, IMO).  Thank you!

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Thinking further about this topic I can think of only 2 wifi problems I've had on holiday. One was where I could not raise the LAN because of weak wifi in the hotel and had to use a static IP to get online. The other was when the hotel had some weird Web based login protocol and my Adblocker was stuffing the popup required to enter the credentials. Disabling the Adblocker fixed that.

I have long ago figured out cruise ship wifi because if you go for help to the ship's business center they ask you straight away if you are running Mac or Windows. When you say "Debian Linux" they swallow their bubblegum.

 

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One piece of strangeness I came upon duing the Debian upgrade was that during the build of initramfs after any further upgrades I got a bunch of warnings complaining about missing firmware for i915 - which is odd because that is the module the Thinkpad graphics solution uses.

I fixed it by installing linux-firmware but I would have thought that would already have been in place. Oh well it works OK now.

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Missing firmware warnings are just that - warnings. If your hardware works it is inconsequential but as you found, installing that firmware stops the warnings.

Devices usually have a list of firmware versions they look for and go down the list until they find one that is present, printing a warning for those that aren't. If the device finds none and doesn't work, then you need to find and install the correct firmware.

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  • 4 weeks later...

raymac46, do you see any way to edit the date and time on the panel (format)? [* - In GNOME.] I thought I did it with dconf-editor in the past but I can't see where to do it in Bullseye.

Edited by saturnian
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9 hours ago, raymac46 said:

https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/gnome-clock-formats.html

I haven't tried this as the clock is displaying the time the way I like it.

 

Oh, well. Yeah, I saw that extension (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1206/clock-override/), but looks like there's no download available for gnome-shell 3.38 at this time. This is a minor thing, really, but it's something that shouldn't require a shell extension, IMO.

 

By the way, I was looking at a screenshot you posted, thinking about extensions you and others use, and how I normally don't use any extensions. I think that with GNOME, I kinda "live in the shell" -- meaning that I feel like I'm working from the overview more than from the desktop, if you follow me. Maybe that's why I'm okay with the dock being in the overview and not on the desktop, so I don't use the Dash to Dock extension, for example. I don't know if it's a mindset or what.

 

There are a few config tweaks that I'd like to see in GNOME. It'll be interesting to see what's in GNOME 40, but I don't plan on having that here for a few years yet.

 

As for workflow, if I'm mainly using the mouse I think the workflow is slower than in other setups. But throw in the keystrokes and all of a sudden you have multiple ways of doing things. I do tend to use Alt+Tab a lot more often with GNOME; otherwise, I rarely use that keystroke in Linux. I used it a lot in Windows in the past. Plus the "WinKey" to open the overview, and Ctrl+R to run a some stuff. I guess I mostly only use those three keystrokes.

 

Between Ctrl+R and "Show Applications" in the overview, I seem to get by fine without a more traditional applications menu, but it would be nice to have some good config/editing options for that "Show Applications" view.

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GNOME for sure isn't your desktop if you want to customize.

Dash to Dock is a must for me since my wife uses the laptop and I would need to have another DE otherwise. I mostly use the mouse but a few of the keyboard options are nice. I put in the Applications and Places extensions and hid Activities. I also have the show desktop icon in the taskbar. I think I'd probably use multiple desktops and running everything full screen if I was doing any serious work, but mostly I just use the desktop to launch a browser.

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  • 4 weeks later...

One extension that I do like to have, the workspace indicator.

 

workspaces.thumb.jpg.ba2b54d76a36addee3ecd04488b3f46c.jpg

 

 

And, a couple of keystrokes that come in handy:

 

- Super + page up/down to switch workspaces.

- Super > start typing the name of an app > Enter to launch the app.

 

That last one is a really quick way of launching an app if your hands are already on the keyboard. I might have to type 3 letters of the app's name, but a lot of times I only have to type the first letter. Or type the first letter and then use the right/left arrow keys to select the app, then Enter to launch.

 

I generally tend to prefer the mouse, but GNOME Shell's keystrokes do seem to make life a little easier for me, sometimes. That Super button especially.

 

 

Edited by saturnian
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