* EriK is nicely running 7.10 on two machines. Unless you have a general working knowledge of Debian, be VERY wary of the present incarnation of the upgrade tools.
<amphi> I just did an upgrade for a friend of mine with no problem, except it rmeoved the old madwifi driver, and failed to install the new one, so I had to grub about for a patch cable to install the restricted drivers
<EriK> and although I do not know if it's an issue specific to 2.6.22x, specific to the new versions of the hotplug daemon, or specific to my (somewhat common) hardware, but if you have multiple usb buses, beware.
<tanuki_> ...
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<EriK> My box has standard Intel USB1.1 ports on the system board. Several ports on the front that feed from one channel, and a cluster on the back from another. Those appear as two separate pci devices. Plus there is a TI firewire chip on the mobo providing it's standard two ports, one on the front, one on the back. On top of all of that, I have an nec-chipset PCI USB2 card with 7 ports on it.
<EriK> That may sound complicated, but it's just the stock box with the usb2 card added. Up until uhhhh yesterday, it worked fine. I had an external 500G drive (which will do 1394 and usb) on the firewire, mouse/printers/audiotoys/similar on the onboard usb ports, reserving the 2.0 ports for my mp3 player and video capture dongle
<EriK> After upgrading, basic usb devices (mice, printers) would continue to work, no matter what port plugged into, but the external HDD would just generate nasty sounding error messages, whether plugged into either firewire port or any of the three usb buses
<EriK> almost gave me a heart attack until I tried the drive on another box! When you are just assuming "ok, usb otta work" (and by golly, the usb mouse is working) and it gives nasties, you get that sinking feeling.
<EriK> just on a whim (and noticing that the firewire is sharing an irq with one of the usbs....which is possibly related, but it's always been that way, and my bios is very insistant)
<EriK> I disabled the onboard usb (1.1)
<EriK> and after moving the orphan devices onto the usb2 card and digging a 4-port passive hub out for the slow stuff (so I actually have some empty ports left)
<EriK> all is well
* Drew3 blows smoke into the room and wants to know the ending to EriK tale.
<EriK> drive works great, whether by firewire or usb
<EriK> just wasted too much of my life figuring that out
<EriK> bbiaf
<EriK> In the course of the upgrade on the same machine, the installer mildly hosed my apache config causing it to get very angry when it tried to do the dozen or so force-reloads on it. I manipulated it behind the scene. It later got pissed when trying to do something with acpi, which manually rmmod'ing the acpi module in another window solved.
<EriK> Those couple of issues left a lot of crud due to the unmet dependencies, but nothing that a few trips through dpkg -C and apt-get dist-upgrade, apt-get autoremove, etc. did not solve.
<EriK> The upgrade on the laptop went similar, only bombing on something bluetooth related that I could not fix from another shell window, leaving a similar state, solved in a similar way.
<EriK> Only other negative things I can say about the updater is that it is slow and asks way too many questions. e.g. if other packages have changed your apache or php config, you will hear about it. I can look at the diff and answer the 'keep/replace' question in a heartbeat. Could my mother? it also asks questions about how you want pam configure, etc., that I would not expect my mother to know how to answer.
* Drew3 thinks that doing other than security updates, is self-inflicted pain.
<Drew3> Up-grading your distro is like eating to much pop-corn at the movie theater.
<amphi> debian dist-upgrades have always gone without a hitch for me
<Drew3> amphi: is lucky. and .deb itself (not its progeny) is conservative. (that's a good thing)
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<EriK> Even after the couple of quirks, a *vast* majority of which seemed related to a sudden change in irq-sharing which I would have likely hit with the new kernel anyway, it was an otherwise uneventful upgrade
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<EriK> and the upsides look good so far, the provided/supported (proprietary) ATI driver is *vastly* better, the annoying bugs in the broadcom wifi are fixed, the xgl and composite stuff ('desktop effects' ...beryl/compiz/emerald/whateveritsaclledtoday) works on the ati/amd dell laptop out of the box
<EriK> All of the odd-sounding APIC error messages on the laptop have gone away, and suddenly suspend/resume and related seem to work perfectly and smoothly. Stubborn power management and mediocre battery life were my only issues with feisty on that machine.
<EriK> although not (nvidia) twinview-aware, the updated x configurator is a gift from god. setting up multiple displays now involves only a couple of mouse clicks, much as brand M and brand A have had for a couple of years now.
<EriK> (hint: drew)