[SGVLUG] My Debian upgrade ( was Re: presenting debian etch netinst)

[David Lawyer]

I just installed something which is newer than Debian Etch.  It's
the Debian "testing" version which is unstable but newer.  All I had
to do (sort of) was type "apt-get upgrade" on the command line.

All this over a 24K modem.   At first it said 2d ... meaning the
expected time to download was only 2 days (48 hours).  But this was
longer than it actually took since there was congestion when it showed
this.  It actually took only about 14 hours of connect time  Last time I
upgraded I got a complaint from my ISP since you are only supposed to
be online for an hour at a time.  You get cut off after an hour (2
hrs. late at night) but I used automatic redial and then did
sleep 5h; su halt
at about midnite to halt the system at about 5am so as not to be online
too long.  My wife then turned off power at 6am.  So it took me almost
a week to download "testing" in bits and pieces and slept, went on
bike rides, read, or worked at my dumb terminal when it was downloading.

Then the install went flawlessly using my 24-year-old dumb terminal
for interaction.  There are a number of scripts/config-files that I've
modified in the past and during the install those were detected and it
asked if I wanted to keep them or install new ones.  In most cases I
installed new ones, but had to look for my initials (DL) in the old
ones to see what I modified and then usually made the same change to
the new one.

Some of these modification would not have been necessary if Debian had
done a good job of setting up configuring.

One problem with Debian is that they never made it easy to
automatically compensate for hardware clock drift.  I complained about
it and various things happened: like instructions that said not to
try to set it up to do this, or inviting me to maintain the package
(so that I could fix the problems I had filed bug reports on).  I
didn't accept this job but I did modify the init script to get it to
work right.  

The way it works is to measure how much your hardware clock drifts
(like say 3 sec./day fast) and then every day it moves the hardware
clock back 3 sec. (or whatever) so that it shows the correct time.
But when you actually manually set it to the correct time say 3 months
later, it then may discover that the drift was really 3.1 sec/day and
then uses this revised drift for future corrections.  It really should
try to determine the drift of the drift (2nd derivative) and use that
too :->.  I don't think hardly anyone except me is using this feature
as most people let the time taken from the Internet set the hardware
clock.

The maintenance of Debian Packages is quite variable.  A package that
wasn't maintained for years found a maintainer that did a good job of
improving it.

One thing that I am very dissatisfied with is the slow booting, taking
a few minutes on a Pentium I.  I was going to track down the bugs
(or inefficient programming) causing this but never found the time to
do it.
			David Lawyer