Hello folks,

I just installed 8.2, upgrading from 8.0 and keeping my home partition. Apt-get dist-upgrade had broken twice my 8.0 installation (the bright side is that it gave me a good reason to try 8.2...), thus I have a couple of question before I start playing with 8.2:

- These are the repos enabled in Synaptic after the installation:

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" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false mepis-8.0 main

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" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false stable main contrib non-free

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" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false testing main contrib non-free

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" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false testing/updates main contrib non-free

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url was:"http://www.debian-multimedia.org/"
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" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false stable main

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" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false testing main

Are these ok or should I add/remove any before I do any update, upgrade or dist-upgrade?

- I do not have an Intel graphic chip, but an ancient NeoMagic video chip. The computer is a museum-ready HP OmniBook 900 (vintage PII 300MHz). When apt-get dist-upgrade broke my Antix M8 X wouldn't start but other than that the system worked fine from CLI. Should I hold any Xorg upgrade just in case?

- What is the recommended setting for Synaptic for"System Upgrade" in Preferences/General,"Smart Upgrade" or rather"Default Upgrade"?

- Any other recommendation for a brand new 8.2 install?

Thanks!

Hi GoLinux. I'm using 8.2 and have the default sources.list, like yours. The testing repos prevail over the stable ones since they are newer versions.

I've been upgrading through the smxi script (not installed by default) which uses the dist-upgrade command. That has been working very well but it sometimes removes this or that since, I guess, it follows Debian's development. So it removed mplayer (which can be installed back) and I just went with vlc instead, also some time ago it removed streamtuner and since I didn't bother with it, I left it like that (but I could have pinned it or downgraded to stable etc. if I want dist-upgrade to not remove it).

Also your xorg problem was definitely related to the upgrade, as you can see in some forum threads. This is Debian testing's way, but if we pay attention, there's always the first guy/girl who finds the issue and alerts the rest and anticapitalista also uses to alert about these things.

secipolla is right (except that smxi is installed by default in antiX).

Personally, I do a dist-upgrade using apt-get in a terminal, rather than use synaptic.
A simple upgrade will never remove anything, but you may run into depenency problems down the line.

secipolla and anti,

thanks for your comments. I was already planning to use smxi, I read about it on the Antix wiki and saw several comments on the forum. I do not mind having to re-install an application here and there, but getting X broken on my otherwise perfectly working Anitx-M8 was annoying...

I had done the dist-upgrade on Antix-M8 from terminal, I use Synaptic only for installing individual packages or for a routine upgrade. Obviously the Xorg issue applies to the NeoMagic chip as well, regardless of how the dist-upgrade is done.

So, to summarize, best to not use Synaptic at all for even a"regular" upgrade once in a while, but use smxi from terminal for a dist-upgrade? I have been using MEPIS for several years and the approach seems to be different, as, if I remember correctly, a dist-upgrade is usually not recommended for MEPIS unless you really know what you are doing.

Thanks again.

I'm happy to report that I did a apt-get dist-upgrade (from terminal of course) and all went well. Just to play it safe I did this before:

echo xserver-xorg hold|dpkg --set-selections
echo xserver-xorg-core hold|dpkg --set-selections

so far, so good...

GoLinux,

glad to hear all is ok at the moment.
However, I'm not totally sure that the reason for your antiX-M8 upgrade going up in smoke was simply because of xorg not suiting your hardware. If you want to play a bit, as a tester that is, try apt-get dist-upgrade with no packages on hold.
One way or the other we will know if the latest xorg is a problem for your box or not.

Hello Anti,

yeah, I suppose I can try the next apt-get dist-upgrade without holding back xorg. After all, what's another re-install! __{{emoticon}}__ This is my"fun machine" anyway, it is so old I keep it just for learning as I break and fix things.

By the way, I have always had a strange issue with this computer: the screen is 12" and the resolution is 800x600. All works well when GRUB starts and X is active, but while Antix or even MEPIS are going through the boot process before X starts or when I shut down X completely after boot, the video mode is a 800x600 window in a 1024x768 workspace.

It is very annoying, as the last few rows of the CLI are at the bottom,"outside" of the visible 800x600 window.That makes it impossible to work with a real CLI, as the line where the commands are typed is not visible...

Thus, is there a boot option I can type in GRUB to force not only X but also the CLI to work at a 800x600 resolution? I recall that even when I started to experiment with Knoppix years ago (one of my first forays in the Linux world), I had the same problem, so it does not depend on the distro, but on some weird characterisitc of this machine.

Any suggestion is welcome.

Thanks.

Let anti confirm that, but antiX has vga=791 set at the boot line in grub and you could change it to vga=788

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Seems like good advice secipolla

You guys rock... I thought the VGA= xxx setting was for X. DUH!!!!

It goes without saying that it worked. Now it will be even more fun to play with a"true" CLI without having to open Terminal from within X.

Thanks!!!