Upgrading to "Lenny"
With “Etch” being released as new Debian stable I decided to upgrade to “Lenny”, Debian’s new testing branch. By the time of writing the difference between stable and testing isn’t very big - Etch was released about three weeks ago. So I didn’t expect any difficulties in upgrading and with one little exception I was right.
As always, updating Debian is very easy. You need to edit “/etc/apt/sources.list” and replace etch or stable with lenny or testing. I prefer the names, because this way you would automatically use the stable branch once lenny becomes stable - which will be in the far, far future. ;-) So, your “sources.list” should look something like this:
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Etch amd64: installing 32bit apps
If you’re running Debian Etch for amd64 you might want to install some 32bit applications, too. As some browser plugins (like Adobe’s Flash oder Sun’s Java) are available as 32bit binaries only, you may need a 32bit browser. In Ubuntu that was done very easily whereas in Debian this task needs a bit of extra work. So, here we go. (The original post can be found in German on debianforum.de. Thanks to “Linuxpeter”!)
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Configuring Debian Etch
Grub
As mentioned in my last post, installing Etch was very quick and easy. If you need to boot the installation CD/DVD with special kernel options, they will be added automatically to grub’s menu.lst and will be there after each kernel update when the menu.lst file is regenerated. Responsible for this is a part of /boot/grub/menu.lst which looks like this:
Back to the roots!
Installing Vista did of course (and not surprisingly) overwrite the MBR so I couldn’t boot into Ubuntu anymore. I took this as an excuse for doing a clean Linux install and decided to go for Debian Etch. I downloaded a weekly snapshot from here, to be precise “debian-testing-amd64-kde-CD-1.iso”. You don’t need to download more than the first CD iso depending on your preferred desktop. Choosing the default “CD-1.iso” will leave you with Gnome as desktop. But you may change your mind later on and install one or the other desktop environment. OK, so download one of the “CD-1”.iso’s, burn it to CD and boot it.
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My Vista Experience, Pt. 2
Vista and current hardware should be no problem. But what about some more ancient piece of hardware?
Before installing Vista I upgraded my motherboard’s BIOS to the latest version (which by the time of writing was “F5” for my Gigabyte “GA-M55S-S3”). I think that wouldn’t have been absolutely necessary but I also hoped getting rid of my Linux “noapic-problem” - which I sadly didn’t… As already mentioned, installation of Vista was peace of cake and video, sound and ethernet worked right away. As I like to play “World of Warcraft” I did install the original vendors drivers for video, sound and chipset for better performance. No problems so far. Same goes for my Terratec Cinergy DVB-T USB stick and my HP Photosmart printer.
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