Goodbye Lenny!

No, I don't actually know anybody named Lenny except the current Debian GNU/Linux stable distribution.

I switched from openSUSE 10.3 to Debian Lenny when it was the testing distribution back in... November 2008 IIRC. I also installed it on my HP Pavilion dv5-1132la laptop — which I received for Christmas the same year and still use as of this writing — but I continued tracking Lenny instead of the new testing distribution when Lenny became the new Stable on February 2009.

Defying all laws of Common Sense™ (again!), I'm now going to try to switch “back” to Debian testing — which is, this time, Squeeze.

I admit that I feel a lot of curiosity for trying KDE 4.3, but I also want to see how well are some other software packages doing: uswsusp, freetype, the GIMP, Iceweasel, VLC media player, and Boost, among others. I'm currently using a few packages that I built from their Sid sources with Lenny:

  • GIMP 2.6.6
  • Gutenprint 5.2.3 (story)
  • irssi 0.8.14

I'm also already using a few software packages or versions from their upstream providers:

  • Linux 2.6.31.6
  • DOSBox 0.73
  • qemu 0.11.0
  • VirtualBox 3.0.10 (story for both this and qemu)
  • QtCurve 0.68.1
  • radeonhd module for X.org - constantly updated from the upstream git repository's HEAD
  • kvirc 4.0.0 RC1 + svn (r3496)

I love how well Debian has worked for me till now — despite running across some really, really bad issues (my fault) compromising the installed system's integrity, I've never needed to reinstall the distribution and I had forgotten how often Windows users need to reinstall everything when a single piece breaks. Although I'm running a kernel version greater than the one Debian Lenny ships with I've had mostly no problems except a very random bug with Audacious that crashes it when playing MP3 audio files.

So why would I switch to Squeeze if I seem to be perfectly safe and comfortable with my current system configuration?

  • I want to check any new and shiny stuff included with newer versions of the Boost library, which is an essential dependency for the Listra and Thoria, tools that I'm writing for the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev project.
  • I want to try KDE 4.3 in a live environment.
  • The VLC media player version included in Lenny is a bit “outdated”, the Squeeze/Sid versions pull dependencies not available in Lenny, and the upstream package is also a bit difficult to compile since apt-get build-dep won't help me here.
  • Firefox/Iceweasel 3.5 is hopefully more stable than Firefox/Iceweasel 3.0 (it's not a problem specific to Debian's fork, really) so it could be an opportunity to recover my faith in Mozilla...
  • I want to try KDE 4.3 in a live environment.
  • The version of scons which ships with Lenny has some mildly annoying bugs.
  • Did I mention I want to try KDE 4.3?

I don't really expect to have much trouble upgrading, but I've backed up my /etc and /srv trees, some stuff from /var, and not to mount the partition for /home on the first reboot with Squeeze; I'll be using a minimal /home tree from the rootfs partition first. It helps that I'm using separate partitions for /var, /usr, /usr/local, /opt and /home since day zero. Maybe I'm being slightly paranoid — why would KDE 4.3 kill my home dir anyway? 😛

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