Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

pvsage · 2012-06-12 23:50:51

As I'm sure many here will remember, whenever a new "point release" of Statler came out, the most reliable upgrade path was, unfortunately, a clean install. Has anyone heard anything about Corenominal developing a more painless upgrade path for getting from Statler to Waldorf? (Perhaps a script?)

Looks like someone's recently tried such an upgrade through editing sources.list, and it hasn't gone entirely well...

pidsley · 2012-06-13 00:51:34

Thanks for starting this. For experienced Debian users "upgrading" from Statler to Waldorf may be a trivial task, but for new users (and we seem to have quite a few lately) I think reinstalling might just be the best option, especially if they haven't done much to reconfigure their Statler install. There also seems to be quite a bit of confusion as to which version new users should install, as there are three "current" versions out now. New users say "I just installed #!" and the first thing we have to ask is "which version"...

Personally, I think Waldorf is mature enough already, and Statler should be not be recommended for new users at this point. Many problems (wireless, graphics, networking in general) are fixed when people switch from old Statler (the 2.32 kernel) to Waldorf with the new kernel.

(edit) or at least there should be some guidance on the download page as to what the different versions are and why someone might choose one or the other...

Last edited by pidsley (2012-06-13 00:58:35)

machinebacon · 2012-06-13 01:10:02

pvsage,

I beg to differ big_smile

The user tried upgrading to Debian testing, not to Waldorf (see his reference to the other post, and see the guide there - it clearly disables Crunchbang sources). It is a difference, and not just a small difference, if you upgrade squeeze to testing/wheezy or if you upgrade statler to waldorf. You can see this from the errors catch22 got: slim should come from waldorf repos, tint2 too, and libavtools breaks because of the split mm-repos which have additionally been renamed recently.

pidsley · 2012-06-13 01:18:02

machinebacon, I think this just reinforces the need for good instructions for upgrading -- people (like Catch22) are using the "upgrade to testing" thread that was posted for upgrading Statler to testing, because right now (in my opinion) there is no good beginner's guide for upgrading Statler to Waldorf.

(and personally, I think the recommended path should again be a clean reinstall, at least for new users, but that's just my opinion) wink

Last edited by pidsley (2012-06-13 01:20:39)

machinebacon · 2012-06-13 01:21:55

That's right, there's no all-valid guide and if we take into consideration that we had 2011.02, 2011.11 and 2012.02 releases, it makes it quite hard to nail the differences (heck, I don't even remeber what the default login managers/browsers/editors were in these versions)

To be honest, I would love to hear a statement like "A clean install is the only recommended way" but we can still try to help users who want to do it manually.

And it would be great if upgraders would first post what they *want to* do, ask for instructions, and *then* proceed. Cleaning up the mess is more work than linking to a specific thread.

machinebacon · 2012-06-13 01:24:21

pidsley wrote:

... right now (in my opinion) there is no good beginner's guide for upgrading Statler to Waldorf.

I wrote a post when Waldorf came out, but it's buried in another post. It should actually be okay, with little modifications to the openbox menu, IIRC.
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/213755/#p213755

pvsage · 2012-06-13 01:25:33

I too would like to see either "You should do a clean install" or "Here's a script to automate most of the process, but there are some caveats."

frankob · 2012-06-13 01:27:56

That's true. I have been dist-upgrading from Statler to Waldorf, and have had much less issues. I mean, there are some, but nothing really critical. At least I don't see them as critical. But I am trying to solve them, anyway, as some of them are a bit annoying.
You can see a report of my experience, along with some fixes, and some questions on how to fix others, here: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … o-waldorf/

I agree with Pidsley, too. I guess a clean install would have been faster and much less of a pain than what I did... But the installer at this point seems to be buggy too, and I was unable to install it on my off-line-during-installation machine, so I basically had no other choice.
And this brings me to agree with Pvsage, too. For these specific cases, a well done script would be VERY handy.

Pidsley, I personally wouldn't encourage new users to install Waldorf just yet, until the installer isn't really fixed. If I supposedly had the same experience with the Statler installer that I had with the Waldorf one, I would most probably just give up #!, and moved on to try another distro.

pidsley · 2012-06-13 01:49:11

machinebacon wrote:

pidsley wrote:
... right now (in my opinion) there is no good beginner's guide for upgrading Statler to Waldorf.
I wrote a post when Waldorf came out, but it's buried in another post. It should actually be okay, with little modifications to the openbox menu, IIRC.
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/213755/#p213755

That's good! I am planning to try it tomorrow (both from backports and non); I'll try to post my results...

(but I still think a clean reinstall should be the recommended path) smile

Last edited by pidsley (2012-06-13 01:52:05)

pidsley · 2012-06-13 01:50:13

frankob wrote:

Pidsley, I personally wouldn't encourage new users to install Waldorf just yet, until the installer isn't really fixed. If I supposedly had the same experience with the Statler installer that I had with the Waldorf one, I would most probably just give up #!, and moved on to try another distro.

Interesting; I have installed Waldorf at least twice now with no problems.

machinebacon · 2012-06-13 02:09:11

pidsley wrote:

That's good! I am planning to try it tomorrow (both from backports and non); I'll try to post my results...
(but I still think a clean reinstall should be the recommended path)

That's good, too. So you'd go 2012-releases -> Waldorf. Should be okay if the backports/statler-mm/-mozilla repos are disbaled for the dist-upgrade.

I do remember that corenominal stated a fresh install is recommended when the last two stables came out, so - considering the 'testing' state of Waldorf - it should be the same here, too.

pvsage · 2012-06-13 02:14:13

However, Corenominal recently chose to quit his paying job to devote himself to developing CrunchBang full-time, so perhaps some of that work will go into providing a more direct path...

pidsley · 2012-06-13 02:18:06

machinebacon wrote:

I do remember that corenominal stated a fresh install is recommended when the last two stables came out, so - considering the 'testing' state of Waldorf - it should be the same here, too.

I completely agree, given the many other basic changes that have been made (themes, compton vs xcompmgr, cb-whatever scripts, notify-osd, (hal vs dbus?)); there really isn't a "clean" upgrade path that could be automated.

Perhaps we do need a ruling from the "dear leader"...

pidsley · 2012-06-13 02:21:36

machinebacon wrote:

pidsley wrote:
That's good! I am planning to try it tomorrow (both from backports and non); I'll try to post my results...
(but I still think a clean reinstall should be the recommended path)
That's good, too. So you'd go 2012-releases -> Waldorf. Should be okay if the backports/statler-mm/-mozilla repos are disbaled for the dist-upgrade.

That's the plan, at least; I already have both 2012 isos downloaded, so I'll dd to a USB stick, install from that, and then try to upgrade. It should be interesting.

elvaqueroloco · 2012-06-13 04:27:04

I think everyone is making some pretty valid points here.

For what this rookie's two Lincolns are worth, I tried to dist-upgrade from the November '11 Statler release (I think?) on a laptop by changing the repo paths in the sources.list and then dist-upgrade (I followed this How-To). Seemed to work fine but got caught up on something towards what seemed to be the end.

I don't know if this is what is meant by "dependency hell" but my machine squawked at me for some missing deps or libs(?). I realize I can just pop in my CD with the latest Waldorf iso and save myself the trouble but I figured it might be a good learning opportunity to try and figure out how to round up those missing doggies.

If I sound like I know what I'm talking about, it is purely by accident. wink tongue

When referring to a possible script, do you guys mean like what you get when you are greeted by the update dialog with a fresh install where it walks you through several steps?

If I may ask at the risk of going OT, and this is for my curiosity's sake, what kind of glaring issues are people running into with the installer? I realize it is one of the YMMV situations, but it seemed to go fine for me.

VastOne · 2012-06-13 04:32:16

This has been an interesting read, thanks for kicking it off pvsage.

I think that reinstalling is the only option that can be supported simply because that alone eliminates every other variable making it the safest (and sanest) decision.

It has been the CrunchBang / corenominal stance in the past and do not see it changing. What I would like to see is a How To (#! Style/Wiki Style) for creating a separate /home partition which will make the upgrade path a lot easier... BUT, there are a lot of different opinions even on that one.

I do not agree that a RC or Beta or whatever it is called should not be the recommended install choice simply because it is not. I agree that the Waldorf RC release is ready, but because Debian and corenominal are not ready to pull the switharoo, I do not think we should be ready to support that move either.

Having said that, I know we are doing that already and please do, go right on ahead and download Waldorf and have at it... cool

VastOne · 2012-06-13 04:38:52

elvaqueroloco wrote:

I think everyone is making some pretty valid points here.
If I may ask at the risk of going OT, and this is for my curiosity's sake, what kind of glaring issues are people running into with the installer? I realize it is one of the YMMV situations, but it seemed to go fine for me.

I have the same question, and honestly was not aware of any installer issues.

pvsage · 2012-06-13 04:39:47

Regarding the "It has been the CrunchBang stance" point...I was just thinking that, since Debian users are apparently able to go from Stable(Etch) to Stable(Lenny) to Stable(Squeeze)...but they probably have headaches related to this too, don't they? (I didn't jump over to Debian until Philip made the change in CrunchBang 10, and I never visit their forums, so I wouldn't have knowledge of this. neutral )

VastOne · 2012-06-13 04:42:43

^ It is nothing any different (or more) than changing from Stable to Testing at any given time, IMO. But as pidsley has pointed out, the hooks that make #! different from one update to the next is the real difference maker.

machinebacon · 2012-06-13 04:49:41

Anyway, those cool guys who want to have Waldorf very much (or #! Sid - what would that be called - "#! Bork" ?) the complicated way (sources -> dist-upgrade) will do it anyway, no matter if there is an official statement (like the disclaimer) or not. tongue I can hardly imagine corenominal coming up with a Statler->Waldorf script, as it doesn't make much sense right now: Waldorf is in testing phase, the backported images have been released a few months ago and prove Statler to be working on most hardware, Wheezy is not even frozen yet (though, it will come soon), and the underlying changes (see pidsley's post above) are not just cosmetic.

@vaquero: The problems with Waldorf's installer are: "cannot detect CD-ROM" when booted from USB, "No network connected" when using wlan or a router without DHCP enabled, GRUB not being written on the correct partition, GRUB not detecting all other OS's, that's what I remember having read here on the forums. Of course this depends on the hardware. It would also be nice to have the choice of a persistent USB install (maybe with kernel boot parameter 'persistent' like in grml/knoppix/aptosid/siduction-style) the easy way.

VastOne · 2012-06-13 05:04:49

^ Glad to see Bacon all the way back! With even better stubble now! big_smile

rizzo · 2012-06-13 05:07:46

I've always recommend a clean install. I've never seen any distro provide a clear and reliable upgrade path, even when they claim to. It's always much cleaner to start afresh.

machinebacon · 2012-06-13 05:13:03

@Vast1: Hi Babe!

Last edited by machinebacon (2012-06-13 05:13:15)

elvaqueroloco · 2012-06-13 05:15:38

@MB

Anyway, those cool guys who want to have Waldorf very much (or #! Sid - what would that be called - "#! Bork" ?) the complicated way (sources -> dist-upgrade) will do it anyway...

Which raises another question (for me at least) -- will downloading the final Waldorf iso (once it officially becomes stable) be the generally recognized/agreed upon best method, rather than changing one's sources from testing to stable if you are currently running Waldorf testing?

And for the record, I changed my sources to testing on my laptop for linux learning purposes, not because I am cool -- although it is an indisputable fact I am. cool lol

Post-post-Edit: ^ @omns, I defer to your wisdom. wink

Last edited by elvaqueroloco (2012-06-13 05:16:52)

VastOne · 2012-06-13 05:17:36

^^ Watch it, rhowaldt may be lurking... lol

@ elvaqueroloco, with a name like elvaqueroloco, and From: #! Rodeo bucking chute, how could you not be cool! cool

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#1 2012-06-12 23:50:51

Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#2 2012-06-13 00:51:34

Re: Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#3 2012-06-13 01:10:02

Re: Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#4 2012-06-13 01:18:02

Re: Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#5 2012-06-13 01:21:55

Re: Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#6 2012-06-13 01:24:21

Re: Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#7 2012-06-13 01:25:33

Re: Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#8 2012-06-13 01:27:56

Re: Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#9 2012-06-13 01:49:11

Re: Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#10 2012-06-13 01:50:13

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#11 2012-06-13 02:09:11

Re: Statler-to-Waldorf upgrade path?

#12 2012-06-13 02:14:13

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#13 2012-06-13 02:18:06

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#14 2012-06-13 02:21:36

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#15 2012-06-13 04:27:04

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#16 2012-06-13 04:32:16

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#17 2012-06-13 04:38:52

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#18 2012-06-13 04:39:47

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#19 2012-06-13 04:42:43

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#20 2012-06-13 04:49:41

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#21 2012-06-13 05:04:49

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#22 2012-06-13 05:07:46

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#23 2012-06-13 05:13:03

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#24 2012-06-13 05:15:38

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#25 2012-06-13 05:17:36

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