Hi competent team!

Congratulation for spetacular distro MX-14.4. I am enjoy!

I have two question:

1º Can i update for Jessie (8.0) modifying the repo?

2º Can i to use the repos antix and main.mepis for Jessie to i install the xfce 4.12? How? What repo should i use?

Thank you in advance.

TEMS
Brazil

Excuse-me for my poor english.

a few of the devs have tried upgrading with Jessie repos and they did not go well. so hold off on that.

I'm not sure the current 4.12 in mx will work in Jessie as it was back ported to wheezy.

If you want to"take a walk on the wild side", as I often do, on at least one of my MX-14 instances I have my Debian repositories set to"Testing", which until this past weekend pointed at the Debian Jessie repositories; now that will point to the new"Testing".

I cannot speak about Testing now because I've not changed MX-14 this week, but as of last week I was running Jessie packages on one of my MX-14 systems with Xfce 4.12 - at least I'm pretty sure I did; whatever configuration I had was working without a hitch, though I did have to"tweak around" with the package imanager initially to get the key signatures working correctly - something that we've discussed on other threads here. I did not notice any collisions between Xfce and Debian repos, so unless I did not actually get Xfce 4.12 on that system and I still have Xfce 4.10 running there, it APPEARED to work fine for me.

I tend to be able to easily detect and resolve minor packaging issues, though and I am probably far from a typical"use case", so as Dolphin Oracle mentions, it might be better to simply wait until the mechanisms are well tested and firmly in place before moving forward unless you have an experimental nature (and a good back up strategy in case things get messed up so that you can easily revert to something that works reliably).

Well, I can now speak for doing an update.

Last night I set my repo to Stable across the board - (rather than Wheezy, which is now"Old Stable". Jessie is now Stable. That resulted in over 1,200 package updates, though some of them appear to be little more than recompiled packages for this release and kernel infrastructure.

For the most part the change works, but you have to recognize that there may be a few first pass errors that require rerunning the update, and you also have to recognize that MX-14 specific changes are lost unless you are careful to preserve them (or answer the questions perfectly so that MX-14 configurations do not get overwritten.

I did neither, was only moderately careful, and to be certain, I have a few minor issues, but if you want to run Jessie in some form with MX-14, if you are either sharp, or you are willing to tolerate a few changed interfaces (until you explicitly update them yourself), you won't have the complete MX-14 user experience, but you will have a system that still works to some degree.

I'm sure it won't be very long before we have a released version of MX-14 or 15; though a lot of packages changed, the infrastructure really did not change all that much.

Oh yes, not being very careful, I picked up systemd; some of you may not appreciate that; if that is you, wait for the version from anti himself!

Masnick,

Very good!!!
Thank you very very much!

I will go test.

Congratulations.

TEMS

I don't think it is a good idea to try and update MX-14 to jessie. Infact, I know it is not a good idea.
Things will definitely break.

anticapitalista wrote:I don't think it is a good idea to try and update MX-14 to jessie. Infact, I know it is not a good idea.
Things will definitely break.

I guess that all depends on whether you are maintaining a stable desktop (in which you want to avoid craziness and promote stability). In that case you definitely want to stick with a well-documented, well-managed system, and sticking with supported methods is the way to go (in other words, stick with MX-14 using the configuration that is provided).

On the other hand, if you have multiple systems and at least one of them can be used as a test platform, or if you have a sufficiently useful backup and restore strategy, you can do weird and crazy things, breaking software, then either replace it or fix it. I only do this when I have time, but when I do have time it's a great way to see how things work, how things break, and what to do when a failure occurs.

I've learned more about packaging that way than any other way, but it is definitely not for the faint of heart and is only helpful to those who want to learn by trial and error.

Regarding using MX-14 along with anything other than the current distribution release set up:

As anticapitalista clearly stated,"I don't think it is a good idea to try and update MX-14 to jessie. Infact, I know it is not a good idea. Things will definitely break."

That is indeed the case. There are ways around it, but in essence, those ways mostly involve one of two things: either decoupling from the current MX packages and more or less going your own way, or reverting back to the MX packages. This doesn't mean it can't be done. Over the weekend, I just noticed that the siduction team now has Xfce 4.12 built against their latest stuff, which has Sid packages and their own 4.0.2 kernels. Clearly it can be done, but they've compiled virtually the entire infrastructure to do it, and that's basically what it would entail to put someone's own complete MX system in. Given that we use distributions because they build infrastructures containing whatever is needed to meet their release, yeah, until MX builds against Wheezy++, that is, Jessie or Debian Stable 8.0, for the time being, it's a lot easier hanging with what you have at the moment.

Believe it or not, of the three antiX-based environments I currently have installed and working properly, the only one at this moment that works against Debian Testing is antiX 13.2, because I've been running it against Testing since day 1 and it's picked up the changes gradually over time. AntiX 15 Beta is the next closest. But MX is much safer staying with stuff named Wheezy.

One quirk that I noticed over the weekend though is that not all Debian repos seem to recognize"Wheezy" any more. Not sure if they are calling it only"oldstable", if they were having temporary issues, or what. I'll look into that later this week.

I went back to running MX-14.4 in the recommended configuration that is supported by the distribution. It was simply a matter of reinstalling the software, choosing NOT to overwrite the partition, leaving /home intact, but reinstalling the system software, then updating only the packages as provided by the supported repository configuration.

I've left my experimentation to other versions and reverted MX-14.4 into a safe, stable, well supported instance. In that configuration, it's one of the most stable distributions out there at the present time.

I also put one of the antiX 15 Beta instances back in a recommended configuration and it continues to work well. I have an older antiX 13.2 installation that has been using Debian Testing for quite a while. As you might imagine, that version has been using systemd for some time. Letting it go its own course for over a year, it's done surprisingly well. So now I have three very different spins - the very stable MX-14.4, the solid test instance of antiX 15 Beta, an old release of antiX 13.2 backed by current Debian Stable packaging, all of which work differently, each having their own unique feel, management, and underlying software.

I also have an antiX Core instance; that one needs some rework; I'll get to that when I have time to give it the attention that it deserves.