Upgrading an Ancient Debian Install

What better place to keep notes on it.

1st, made a variety of updates to my debconf which had become outdated as my current version (jessie) is so old it’s only part of the debian ‘archives’ project.

On Aug 11 started some backups

1. /etc and /home tarballed and gzipped and sent over to traversecity (/home/muskegon/backups/08012019/)
2. Spent some time reviewing current disk usage on my tiny 75 Gb hard drive. Surprisingly, all is reasonable. If the upgrades go well, I’ll finally put in that 500 Gb drive.
   1. I went to use gparted as well as various command line tools and that sent me down the rabbit hole to figure out how to use sudo – never had a compelling need since I’m a single user system and I’m not afraid to become root as needed. Sudo is an interesting topic but no time to go deep on it.
3. Reviewed and bookmark open links on browsers. I’m running Konqueror and Chrome. For the record:
4. Chrome:
   • 127.0.0.1:8888 (Jupyter notebook running off of my home directory)
   • https://www.kaggle.com/c/tgs-salt-identification-challenge/data
   • https://forums.docker.com/t/some-way-to-clean-up-identify-contents-of-var-lib-docker-overlay/30604
   • https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global/lecture/zUdmd/financial-markets-introduction
   • https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/scikit-learn-a-silver-bullet-for-basic-machine-learning-13c7d8b248ee
   • https://towardsdatascience.com/build-your-own-robust-deep-learning-environment-in-minutes-354cf140a5a6
   • https://gradient.paperspace.com/
   • https://www.paperspace.com/console
   • https://colab.research.google.com/github/robert-alvarez/pytorch_tutorial/blob/master/PyTorch_Tutorial_HandsOn.ipynb#scrollTo=zbg5rDZJZtPy
   • https://www.kaggle.com/c/tgs-salt-identification-challenge/discussion/61955#latest-503653
   • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48083552/neo4j-how-to-return-deep-node-data
   • https://www.dremio.com/tutorials/getting-oriented-to-dremio/
   • https://help.github.com/articles/basic-writing-and-formatting-syntax/
   • https://blog.knoldus.com/spark-why-should-we-use-sparksession/
   • https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2016/08/deep-learning-path/
   • https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/black-friday/?utm_source=auto-emailhttps://id.analyticsvidhya.com
   • https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2018/08/dask-big-datasets-machine_learning-python/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AnalyticsVidhya+%28Analytics+Vidhya%29
   • http://timdettmers.com/2018/12/16/deep-learning-hardware-guide/
5. On Konqueror
   • https://xon.sh/tutorial.html
   • https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020561493-After-March-20-2019-installation-of-system-updates-on-Plesk-servers-with-Debian-8-fails-Failed-to-fetch-http-ftp-debian-org-debian-dists-jessie-updates-404-Not-Found
   • http://rpubs.com/stevevejcik
   • https://databricks.com/spark/about

Most of these are bookmarked accordingly. Next step is to continue with steps that look reasonable as obtained from here:

https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/how-to-upgrade-debian-8-jessie-to-9-stretch/

apt-get update (some errors on older repositories)

apt-get upgrade

edit to get stretch

apt-get update failed on thomas.net (tuxboot)

apt-get dist-upgrade

Saw quite a few warnings on updates that could break things. Most seem okay, a touch concerned about xorg, glibc, and linux-new with the implication that I need a 3.2 kernel or newer but I think I have that.

 

Now I need to upgrade glibc but kdm is running. So I need to shut down I think.

Got a notice about modified sysctl.conf I kept my mod which had disabled ipv6, I think that was related to getting hadoop up and running.

Also with sane.d/dll.conf  I think this has to do with scanners and I have no idea why that would be different!

ssh_conf

Looks like the linux kernel will be going from 3.16 to 4.9 (so I think the earlier note about needing 3.2 or newer is okay)

And at the end:

Errors were encountered while processing

apt-listchanges
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Googling got me to a very fine answer here:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/365899/apt-get-error-apt-listchanges-and-debconf?newreg=d25889e4c8f948d4971a7d4d739b179c

The relevant comment:

I started getting this error when I upgraded my computation server from Debian jessieto Debian stretch.

My problem was that I had (foolishly) manually installed Python 3.5 system-wide before the upgrade to stretch, and that version of Python was ‘masking’ the default stretchPython 3 install. In particular, these factors were at play:

• My manual v3.5 install had put its python3 symlink into /usr/local/bin
• The Debian python3 system package had installed symlinks into /usr/bin
• /usr/local/bin was earlier in my $PATH than was /usr/bin

So, to fix this specific problem, all I had to do was rename the /usr/local/bin/python3symlink to, e.g., /usr/local/bin/python3-local, and then import debconf worked fine after a python3 invocation.

A more complete solution would probably be a total uninstall of the system-wide manual version of Python 3.5, and re-installing it sandboxed.

So, I did the same, verified that I could import debconf when I ‘unhid’ the debian python, and set about doing the upgrade again.

This time, the upgrade popped through with no changes. I was a bit suspicious but rebooted.

When I came back, I had a couple issues:

1. Not automatic graphical environment. This is due to KDE switching from kdm as the display manager to something called sddm.  Fix:
   • dpkg-reconfigure sddm
2. jupyter had issues because it had been previously installed manually (I think). Now the easiest thing is to install jupyter-notebook

I’ll continue noting as I find issues.