[Techtalk] upgrading debian

[Wim De Smet]

On 8/23/07, Maria McKinley <maria at shadlen.org> wrote:
> Maria McKinley wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > I upgraded my kernel from 2.4 to 2.6. If I boot into 2.6, networking
> > does not work. I have tried all sorts of things to get it to work
> > (mostly making various changes to /etc/network/interfaces), but can't do
> > it. I've been wanting to move from main to testing for a while, so I
> > thought maybe doing a dist-upgrade would solve the problem. Of course, I
> > can only do this when I am booted into the 2.4 kernel. When I try to do
> > it, apt-get wants to remove the 2.4 kernel, which I'm not ready to do.
> > So now I am stuck, and not sure what to do. Ideas?
> >
> > thanks,
> > maria
>
> I think I am going to just wipe the drive and start over, installing 2.6
> from the start. I do have a silly, low-level question. If you have a
> drive that seems to be having problems, and you are not adverse to
> starting over, is it better to do fsck and then wipe the drive? I'm
> guessing that fsck will tell you about stuff that won't be cured by
> wiping the drive, so you don't waste your time? Or would you find that
> out anyway from the installer?

I believe you can have the installer run "badblocks" when you format
the drive. It will ask you if you want to look for errors. As for your
original problem it sounds like your network module was for some
reason not being loaded. If you were to find the name of it you could
add it to /etc/modules so it is always loaded by default.

As for the apt-get problem I really recommend using aptitude in the
future, after some fiddling at first it's really a lot easier to use
than apt-get, and it does a couple of high level things that are (I
don't think) yet in apt itself in the stable or testing distro, namely
marking libraries and such as automatically installed so they are
removed when you remove the original package you installed. When you
are using apt and it tries to remove something on dist-upgrade you
often have no choice but to manually trace through the dependencies
and see what's causing it to remove certain packages. aptitude makes
it a bit easier by automatically trying to resolve them and allowing
you to cycle through the different options.

HTH,
Wim