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.

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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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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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.

Ever since I first heard of Bradley Kuhn, formerly of the Software Freedom Law Center and now the [Software Freedom Conservancy], on Linux Outlaws, I’ve been interested in what he has to say about (did you guess it?) software freedom. I try to listen semi-regularly to his Free as in Freedom oggcast.

Here is an article from Bradley’s blog on why he returned to Debian recently after years running everything from Red Hat to Ubuntu.

Blosxom, PyBlosxom, Nanoblogger — hell, even WordPress and Movable Type are available as Debian packages.

I wondered, was I missing other blogging platforms, both flat-file and database-driven?

I went to Debian’s web software archive and took a look.

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The 2.6.37 kernel I got from Liquorix has made Debian Squeeze a nearly perfect distribution. The stock 2.6.32 kernel works great, except for sound, where plugging in my headphones doesn’t mute the speakers. This muting works with no configuration change in 2.6.37 from Liquorix.

I also finally have suspend/resume working for pretty much the first time ever in Linux, and I really like using it. The success of suspend/resume might be due to my installing the Debian nonfree firmware, which enabled DRI, which somehow factors into kernel mode setting. My understanding of the whole thing is a little vague, but what I do know is that suspend/resume works great, and this Debian Squeeze installation is running as well as anything I’ve ever used in the world of Linux and BSD.

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I’ve been using the Liquorix kernels on my Debian Squeeze laptop almost since I installed Squeeze in its late-testing phase, and while the GNOME Update Manager doesn’t seem to want to update those kernels from Liquorix, I run Aptitude in a terminal and am able to keep up with the latest kernels.

I’m not exactly sure why Synaptic won’t perform this upgrade. Whenever there’s a new Liquorix kernel in its repository, I get an update icon in my upper GNOME panel (most things on this installation are vanilla Debian). When I run the Update Manager, I get a dialog box asking me whether or not I wish to perform a “safe upgrade.” It seems that whether I answer yes or no, I don’t get the new kernel.

I prefer to update with aptitude anyway, so I run it in the terminal:

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude upgrade

That brings in the new kernels and updates the GRUB bootloader.

Here is the output of sudo aptitude upgrade:

steven@lenovo:~$ sudo aptitude upgrade
Resolving dependencies...                
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64{a} 
  linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64{a} 
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64{u} 
The following packages will be upgraded:
  linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 
2 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 38.6 MB of archives. After unpacking 128 MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
Get:1 http://liquorix.net/debian/ sid/main linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 amd64 2.6.37-10 [5,215 kB]
Get:2 http://liquorix.net/debian/ sid/main linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 amd64 2.6.37-10 [129 kB]
Get:3 http://liquorix.net/debian/ sid/main linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 amd64 2.6.37-10 [33.1 MB]
Get:4 http://liquorix.net/debian/ sid/main linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 amd64 2.6.37-10 [129 kB]
Fetched 38.6 MB in 56s (687 kB/s)                                               
Reading changelogs... Done
Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously deselected package linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64.
(Reading database ... 157978 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 (from .../linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64_2.6.37-10_amd64.deb) ...
Preparing to replace linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 2.6.37-9 (using .../linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64_2.6.37-10_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 ...
(Reading database ... 169099 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 ...
Selecting previously deselected package linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64.
(Reading database ... 157981 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 (from .../linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64_2.6.37-10_amd64.deb) ...
Preparing to replace linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 2.6.37-9 (using .../linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64_2.6.37-10_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 ...
Setting up linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 (2.6.37-10) ...
Setting up linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 (2.6.37-10) ...
Setting up linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 (2.6.37-10) ...
Running depmod.
Running update-initramfs.
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
Examining /etc/kernel/postinst.d.
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools 2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/pm-utils 2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/update-notifier 2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub 2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found background image: /usr/share/images/desktop-base/desktop-grub.png
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-1.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-0.dmz.7-liquorix-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-0.dmz.7-liquorix-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-0.dmz.6-liquorix-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-0.dmz.6-liquorix-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1
done
Setting up linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 (2.6.37-10) ...

Current status: 0 updates [-2], 906 new [-1].
steven@lenovo:~$

I’m not the type to run off-distro kernels. While it’s generally not something I’m comfortable with, Liquorix packages these kernels specifically for Debian and optimizes them for desktop use. I have never had a problem.

The reason I’m using Liquorix kernels is that my hardware runs better on the 2.6.37 Linux kernel than it does on the stock 2.6.32 kernel that ships with Debian.

The big difference (and the only one that matters to me) is that the weak sound module (Conexant 5069) in my Lenovo G555 laptop. With the ALSA 1.0.23 driver (many distros ship 1.0.23 ALSA with the 1.0.21 driver in the kernel), I’ve been able to plug in headphones, get audio through them and have the speakers mute. Sounds like a given, but on some distros with the 1.0.23 ALSA driver I can do this with a configuration-file change. In Debian with 2.6.37, this works out of the box.

I’m not crazy about new kernels every few days (or even every few weeks if it’s not absolutely necessary), and I hope to try the Debian Sid kernel when it finally goes past 2.6.32.

But the whole idea of running Debian Stable, in which the apps aren’t yet completely ancient with selected newer bits like the kernel and maybe a few packages from Debian Backports (web browsers and such) is very appealing to me due to the fact that Squeeze is working well on my hardware and for my workflow.