Upgrading Sid!!!

Of late, Debian's sid was getting boring -- no breakages, no -- uninstallable packages, no broken dependencies, no unstable packages, no excitement. Life was getting a bit dull and dreary.

And then it happened -- Etch was released. That means the ``testing'' -- sym link is moved to point to ``stable''. Which means ``testing'' and ``unstable'' aka. Sid are ready for developers to play around with. A stable release is the time when major upgrade to ``sid'' happen.

And I having been using Sid for a looooong time now - close to 7 years. the usual procedure has been to install a minimal ``Woody'' package and edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file to point to Sid. And I had to reinstall once - two years back, when at 2.00 am, I did a sudo rm /root/ * -rvf (yes, I still remember the command; and if you have not noticed, the problem was caused by the space before the *). That was the only problem with Sid I could not manage.

Right now, I did an apt-get update, and find that Sid now has version 2.5 of GNU libc6. And that means major updates to several packages are in the offing. Indeed, version 2.6.20 of the Linux kernel is in, which promptly installed and rebooted into. There is a marked improvement in performance -- this a PIII chugging along at -- 800 MHz with 256 megs of ram!!

And yes, major updates means an occassional broken dependency, which may last for a few weeks even, and that is likely to break several things, and I am keeping my fingers crossed - I never had a broken system due to broken dependencies, and hope I will not have a broken system now.

If you want to know when you installed your Debian, do this:-

 luser@desktop:~$ ls /var/log/installer*

And this is what I get:-

 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 95871 2005-06-19 02:49 /var/log/installer.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  3401 2005-06-19 02:49 /var/log/installer.timings 

That should tell you a couple of things about your install process!!