Upgrade Problems
Posts: 3
I have a laptop running SimplyMepis32 - Wonderful! I love this OS. The Network Manager is the greatest thing ever created! Built in ndiswrapper. Wireless out of the box. Great!
Trouble is. I loaded up synaptic and noticed all the repositories are Ubuntu repositories keyed to the Dapper Drake release. Since dapper is two releases old, I decided all my software needed an upgrade. So I changed the repositories to say "feisty". Low and behold there were a plethora of upgrades available, so I clicked "mark all upgrades" and then "apply". About an hour later, I tried to reboot my computer and that's when I noticed the problem.
GRUB loaded fine and so did Splashy, but the progress bar got about 5-10% of the way full (with 90-95% left to go) and it completely froze. I tried rebooting with each of the other options on GRUB but to no avail. Needless to say I had to reinstall the system.
This would be ok if I could just convince myself to live with two releases old versions of all my software. However, I like having everything up to date and hate having old stuff sitting around. Also I'm a glutton for punishment, so I've tried this procedure two or three different times with the exact same result.
Does anyone know why this is happening, how I can prevent it/fix it after it happens? In short, does anyone know how I can get the latest versions of all the software?
When Dapper was released in
Posts: 50
When Dapper was released in June 06, it was touted as a LTS (Long Term Support) release. Many people thought this meant packages would be updated in the repos for years to come, but, sadly, this is not the case. There have been only security fixes. If you check the Package Sharing section over at mepislovers.org, there are many user contributed packages that are up to date. Supposedly Mepis 7.0 will be out for public testing in a month or two and will switching back to a more up to date Debian base...
Having tried mint with
Posts: 272
Having tried mint with packages -I do not agree with you.Fiesty mint kde running great.Did you try this distro ?John
I think you're barking up the wrong tree
Posts: 1109
I think you're barking up the wrong tree (trying to use newer repositories). There are going to be too many differences and you'll break your install (as you found out).
I'd either wait for the next SimplyMEPIS release, compile the software you need yourself, or dig around with Google and see if anyone has packages already created for newer versions of the software you're looking for.
I've found packages that way in the past (just using google, searching for dapper and the name of the package I needed).
Or, go with a totally different distro. I've got both Sidux 2007-2 (based on Debian Sid) and SimplyMEPIS 6.5.02 installed on my PC right now. I like the Mepis touch. But, sometimes I like to use newer versions of some software, too.
There are pros and cons to any of them (stability, ease of use, available software, etc.).
Jim C.