A whole bunch of updates to Debian Squeeze rolled into my system today:

The following packages will be upgraded: base-files console-setup cryptsetup desktop-base gdm3 gedit gedit-common gnome-screensaver keyboard-configuration libnautilus-extension1 libnm-glib-vpn1 libnm-glib2 libnm-util1 libpulse-mainloop-glib0 libpulse0 linux-base linux-headers-2.6.32-5-amd64 linux-headers-2.6.32-5-common linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64 linux-libc-dev nautilus nautilus-data network-manager python python-dev python-minimal sudo ttf-liberation tzdata tzdata-java usb-modeswitch-data xserver-common xserver-xephyr xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-video-intel

This looks to be the first big update (that I can remember anyway) since Squeeze went Stable.

The new Debian images don’t need so much magic in order to be transferred to a USB stick. You can pretty much cat them over.

But if you want to use usb-creator from Ubuntu, you can pull the Lucid package.

Here’s the output of df -h:

steven@compaq:~$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             2.2G  1.5G  604M  71% /
tmpfs                  70M     0   70M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   65M  104K   65M   1% /dev
tmpfs                  70M     0   70M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda5             388M   85M  283M  24% /home

It doesn’t show in this output, but /dev/sda1 is 500 MB of swap. /dev/sda5 is a logical partition.

One of the helpful steps in the Debian Squeeze release notes, which you really should use when upgrading from Lenny, is to check how much disk space is needed to do the upgrade. I’ve been keeping a relatively large root partition (2.2 GB) for overhead in an upgrade, and if I remember correctly I didn’t need anywhere near that much space to do the Lenny-to-Squeeze transition.

I’ve been burned more than a couple of times when doing upgrades, both Linux and OpenBSD, when I ran out of space in a critical partition in the middle of the process. Being able to check before doing the upgrade is a very good thing.

Now that I know I don’t need all this space for applications, I could start up Parted Magic, shrink the root partition and expand the extended partition that holds /home.

I pulled out the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, circa 1999, with 144 MB RAM (fully loaded), a speedy 233 MHz Pentium II CPU and the original 3 GB hard drive, the latter component of which I haven’t seen since I opened up the bay for the first and last time when I purchased this laptop in, I believe, 2007 for .

I had my CDs ready and loaded up Quirky and Wary — two of the latest Pups. As in the past, loading a live environment — even a Puppy environment — from CD on a 12-year-old laptop can take more than a little time. I was unsuccessful with the Xorg driver while running Wary. A reboot to use the Vesa driver was successful in getting an 800×600 display.

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I had three big updates waiting for me today: Iceweasel (aka Firefox), Icedove (aka Thunderbird) and Chromium (the open-source, community version of Google Chrome).

These are three apps I use often. Nothing major here as far as the updates go — this is Debian Stable, and major isn’t what happens when it comes to updates.

Puppy Linux before. Many times. I started with Puppy 2.13 and still remember that release very, very fondly.

I have half an entry (not yet published) on the Lenny to Squeeze upgrade for my Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop — a 1999 throwback with Pentium II MMX at 233 MHz, 144 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive. I’ve written dozens of articles about this laptop, and I’ve run everything from OpenBSD and TinyCore to Slackware and Debian Lenny and now Squeeze on it.

I did the Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade by the book (the release notes, that is), and everything went perfectly well. I can’t get the new Grub to work, but it’s still chainloading to grub-legacy, so I can stick with that if need be. Maybe a full reinstall would fix this non-problem if it bothered me more than it does (which is “very little”).

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As you can see in the previous entry, I was running my old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop with its recent Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade working well — except for one thing.

Grub2. Debian handled the upgrade well. It doesn’t remove the old Grub, now known as grub-legacy. Instead the old Grub gains an entry chainloading to Grub2, which is installed by the grub-pc package.

This way you can test Grub2 while still retaining Grub1. It’s a very nice way of doing what could be a system-breaking upgrade.

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