[PLUG] Ubuntu to Debian: Day 1

[John Jason Jordan]

Starting Sunday evening I intalled 64-bit Debian Squeeze on a new hard
disk. I saved the old hard disk that has Jaunty x86_64.

Lots of good news:

The GUI installer went into an endless loop repeating an
incompehensible error message. But the text-based installer worked
perfectly. That is, it was perfect except that somehow my user password
was messed up. I don't know how that happened, because you have to type
it twice during the setup. Somehow I managed to mistype it twice in row
the same way. But with Tim Bruce's help I got it fixed.

Then I couldn't install anything because I had no repositories except
for the security repositories. But Paul Mullen's suggestion to use deb
http://debian.oregonstate.edu/debian unstable main non-free contrib,
and the src equivalent, gave me 26,000+ packages. I still don't have a
clear understanding of Debian repos, but at least I have most of the
packages available now and I can deal with figuring out the rest later.
And the oregonstate repo is fast - up to 2.6 MB/s download rate.

The third problem was getting my old hard drive mounted so I could
transfer config files to the new ~/ folder. I still don't completely
understand why it did not automount, but it did mount after rebooting.
Eventually I won't need it any more, so it's not a critical matter.

I have been installing programs that I had on Jaunty, and copying over
the ~/. files. So far I have lost almost no settings. Iceweasel seems
to be happy to use everything that was in ~/.mozilla, including all my
bookmarks, plugins, extensions and themes. Even Sylpheed found all my
folders and e-mails, and also set up my user accounts exactly as they
were in Jaunty. I did lose the current contents of the Inbox, but there
was nothing critical in there.

A shining moment came when I installed Virtualbox. In Jaunty I had
Windows 2000 and Windows XP set up, each with dozens of programs
installed. I was not looking forward to setting them all up again.
Imagine my joy when I discovered that ~/.virtualbox on the old disk was
18.8 GB. I copied it all to ~/ on the new disk and then installed and
launched Virtualbox. Sure enough, there were my virtual machines. And
each boots perfectly with all apps exactly as they were before. Other
than waiting 35 minutes to copy the ~/.virtualbox folder, I didn't have
to do a thing. I fully expected to have to spend the better part of a
day getting those virtual machines set up.

I am also happy to report that my net connection (all ethernet at home)
is way faster that it was in Jaunty. Now, it's pretty unlikely that
Comcast has special faster speeds for people running Debian instead of
Jaunty, so I have to conclude that there must be a better driver for
the gigabit ethernet chip in my Thinkpad.

The setup utility found the wireless chip, but it is not working. The
setup utility asked me to specify which would be the main connection -
ethernet or wireless - and I selected ethernet. I haven't even started
to poke at the wireless to see what is wrong with it. It is an Intel
4965agn, so I am assuming I just need to push a couple buttons
someplace.

Another bit of good news is that the computer now shuts down
completely. In all the time I used Jaunty on this computer it would
shut down X, but leave the kernel running and a dead blinking cursor in
the upper left corner of the screen. (Dead because you couldn't type
anything.) I had to use the power button to finish shutting it down.

The bad news:

One of the important reasons for switching was to get my bluetooth
devices working better. The headphones wouldn't work at all in Jaunty,
although they did work in Hardy. The mouse would quit working every
other day on average and I'd have to delete it and re-pair it. And the
phone would connect, but it was a pain in the neck. 

Well, in Debian the devices are recognized all right, but none of them
are working at all. I have gone from bad to worse.

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Tomorrow the saga cotinues. :)