so i finally got up the nerve, and got frustrated enough with kubuntu that i tried to switch distributions. i have already moved my “real” home directory (which is at /media/home/salamandir ) to another partition, and backed up my “actual” home directory (which is at /home/salamandir ) and put the debian squeeze live disk in… and it looked really pretty, so i clicked the “Debian Installer” icon. it gathered the appropriate information, and then…
HUNG UP when it got to the “Starting the partitioner” window…
TWICE!!
because of the fact that i was running a “live disk”, i was able to figure out how to switch tasks: hitting “ctrl + esc” brings up the system processes window and from that, you’re given a task bar, which has a “close” selection when you right-click on the tasks, and then you’re back at the “live disk” desktop. i tried it again, just to make sure, and it hung up in exactly the same place…
i have been subscribed to the KDE-PIM mailing list for long enough that i have actually seen a person who said he had to downgrade from Kontact 4.8.5 (which is the version i am currently running) because there were so many bugs. i haven’t been able to find out any details on exactly how he did this, and i can’t seem to get any response from the mailing list. i have sent two messages, one subject line was “switching distributions, but keeping KDE… how do i migrate my email?” to which there were no responses, and one subject line was “kmail dispatcher agent is not remembering my SMTP password” which contained a detailed bug report… which has gotten NO responses… 😡
so now i don’t know whether i actually am going to upgrade to debian. at least with kubuntu, there’s a forum that offers some support…
Good idea. You’ll copy all the material in your /etc/apt/sources.lst file. (At least, I think that’s where it is.)
what i need to do — in reality, what i needed to do prior to “upgrading” the first time — is to make a list of all the repositories i’m using on paper somewhere (i actually have an arcane grimoire of mysterious unix/linux spells for doing difficult to remember things), so that i can easily replace things like that when i upgrade next time…
Backports wasn’t enabled? Sigh. (Backports is “when we release new versions, if you choose not to upgrade, we’ll release new versions of software for your current version here.”) Having backports enabled will hopefully allow you to upgrade properly to the versions they say will work better.
Since they’re PPAs, they don’t display full URIs, because they are just arguments that K/Ubuntu plugs in to their own resolver. They do have proper URIs, but you’d have to go find them. And Debian proper doesn’t use the PPA system, nor are packages compiled for Ubuntu compatible.
actually, it didn’t sound as much like gibberish as you probably think… i may need some help with the “pinning” as i don’t even know for sure which repositories are involved…
AND i got ‘hold of yet another repository that contains a lot of upgrades that i could definitely use, which is “ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports”… THAT is the PRIMARY reason i am skeptical about my ability to code the right information about the repositories without some immediate assistance: they’re not standard URIs and they don’t appear to make sense in terms of having a format that i can understand, and yet they’re ESSENTIALLY important in terms of getting the system working…
i did the upgrade with “ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports” and now i’m apparently running the version of amarok that they were telling me i should upgrade to in order to quash those bugs i mentioned, and everything is NOT back to “normal”, but it’s working a HELL of a lot more nicely than it was two days ago… 😐
Ah. For the record, yes, you can play mp3 files on Debian – the requisite libraries and packages are available for installation, but may not be installed by default.
As for downgrading your version, it may be possible to pin your repositories to an earlier version of the software for those specific packages. You’d probably have to uninstall the current versions entirely, do the pinning, then reinstall from the earlier repositories. Failing that, you could download a live disk of earlier software and pin to the disk for those packages so that you didn’t get upgrades (so long as you didn’t run an upgrade while you had a later version live disk in your drive.
That probably sounded like a lot of gibberish, but it might work. Once you know how to pin sources, it’s just a trick of being able to get the right version installed.
another thing that makes me hesitant to use a non-live-disk install is that the non-live-disk installs require that you know a lot more about your hardware than i do, and require that you know a lot more about the details of the software (versions, etc.) than i do…
for example, can you play mp3 files (a proprietary format) on debian? and if so, where do you get the software?
at this point, i’m thinking very strongly about downgrading kontact and amarok rather than messing around any further with an operating system which appears to be reasonably happy…
if i could only find a web-page or something that would tell me exactly how to do it… 😛
It might be that the live-dvd from debian has issues with your computer. It shouldn’t, but maybe it’s a bad iso. Perhaps a different one will succeed. They usually offer a couple different flavors of live-disk to use, depending on how you’re installing. If they offer it somewhere, maybe using the non-graphical install will work better for you.
As for pointing at repositories, that’s generally an after-install thing – you change your apt-sources appropriately to the right distribution and then reload your tool of choice, usually synaptic.
wheezy is still in testing. squeeze is the stable release.
the reason i want to switch is because two of the programs that install by default (and which i use more than any other), which are kontact and amarok, are both buggy enough in their default installations that it is almost impossible to use them.
there are undoubtedly easier ways to work around the problems that i have been having, but i am basically the top of the “computer geek” food-chain with the exception of two guys i know who are notoriously difficult to connect with. i’m currently arguing my case with the debian-user mailing list, which appears to be inhabited by noisy newbies who don’t know that the live-disk i am using is from debian.org… and apart from that, i have nobody who has even heard of debian to ask, apart from you…
and, to be honest, i’m still having difficulty understanding how one “points their repositories to the right place”… my understanding was that the place that determines where the repositories are is on the CD, which is not editable… and even if it were, i have no idea exactly how to code the repositories in the right way to have them be understood by whatever installer slurps them up after i am done messing around with them… 😐
Bad installer, I think. Also, is Squeeze the stable release? My distribution takes its mirror from “wheezy”, the testing release, and it behaves very stably. Perhaps the installer for that distribution will work properly. Then you can just point your repositories at the right place if what you really want is the stable branch.