Wonderful world of new dists..

[Paul Lussier]

"Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:

> -- Ben "Currently running Debian etch, but has gotten tired of having
> the X server break every time I run 'apt-get upgrade'" Scott

Hmm, I'm running Debian mumbledy-something.  I originally installed
potato then started installing from /testing. Occassionally I run
'apt-get install foo' (which always pulls from /testing) and it
requires me to install 5 million other related or otherwise
required-to-be-upgraded packages.  The most recent was installing the
latest version of xxdiff which resulted in having to upgrade to the
X.org stuff.

I was doing all this remotely from work while ssh'ed into my box.
Needless to say, I was rather nervous about remotely horking by box
knowing I didn't really have the time to muck with it at home later to
unhork it.  Amazingly, surprisingly, miraculously everything "just
worked".  Well, not really *just*.  For some reason the xprnt and xfs
packages weren't required by anything else and therefore not
automagically installed.  This meant that when I went to sit down at
the console, though GDM was running, I couldn't read anything because
I had no font server running.  Connecting back in via ssh and
installing both of those packages solved the problem, and I was able
to log back in via GDM and all was good.  I'm still rather surprised
it went *that* well.  I really was prepared for major apt-get surgery!

Oh, and through all that, the system never needed a reboot, and my
screen session running multiple shells and instances of emacs never
stopped.  My e-mail was always accessible as were my active IRC
sessions and I was actively using them all the while this upgrade
ensued!

-- 
Seeya,
Paul