After having installed gusty from scratch on some boxes and via update-manager on others, I decided it’s about time to upgrade my desktop machine as that was still running feisty. Unlike my previous experiences with gutsy this upgrade didn’t turn out to be as easy as pie as it should have been. Ever since I started using debian I upgrade my sources.list and run an apt-get dist-upgrade afterwards to perform a distribution upgrade, so I chose that path for this upgrade, too. Well I shouldn’t have done so: upgrading this way does not remove the deprecated evms package, that renders a gutsy system unusable.

Additionally I had moved my installation partition prior to this upgrade, but I didn’t know that update-grub keeps track of that in commented lines in menu.lst, so it repeatedly rewrote that file with the wrong boot partition, breaking unattended booting. From previous experiments I still had the xserver-xgl package installed without actually using it. Unfortunately the upgrade activated Xgl as default X server, breaking my desktop setup.

Then I had to learn that my favorite audio player is broken in gutsy. At first I considered capitulation and gave other players a try, but they still don’t behave the way an audio player should. So I investigated the problem further and it turns out that re-building the package with the new upstream release (which is available for a month now) fixes the problem. Rather frustrated I added that information to the original bug report.

No, this not the end of the list, yet. After recompiling VDR (more on that later), I discovered that the system crashes after a few minutes of watching TV. Using the ‘generic‘ instead of the ‘rt‘ linux-image actually fixes this, but I had no problems with the previous low-latency images. So, I filed another bug.

Oh, and while writing this entry I went out for while, just to find my mouse cursor to be dysfunctional on my return. Hopefully the bird in approach will be a little more gentle.