I finally decided to upgrade my work desktop to Debian Squeeze:

Preparing for the Upgrade

I manually removed all but the official lenny repositories (and removed the Debian Volatile repository which is no longer used), and updated them to “squeeze”:

$ sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://91.121.125.139/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib
deb-src http://91.121.125.139/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main non-free contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main non-free contrib

Next, in order to minimise download time, I reviewed my installed packages:

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep "ii " | less

And I removed all the unnecessary packages. In particular I decided to remove all of KDE, as I am now using pekwm. When removing packages I found apt-get kept trying to upgrade large numbers of packages. Aptitude was much better, as instead of just trying to install a load of packages, it reported the problem (e.g. package XYZ will be broken by this change) and let me choose the solution. I just added the packages that would be broken to the list of packages to be removed.

Upgrade apt and dpkg

Then I installed apt and dpkg, to save these from having to be upgraded during the upgrade process:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install apt dpkg

Upgrade to Squeeze

Lastly, I ran the upgrade to squeeze with:

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

During the upgrade I receive warnings about /lib/firmware/e100 missing. Mindful of the Debian’s much touted removal of non-free drivers, I did an apt-file search e100 which revealed that I needed to install the firmware-linux-nonfree package. This done, I rebooted.

First Boot

It booted fine to the command prompt, but of course without a login manager it got no further. I simply typed startx to get into pekwm and it all worked perfectly.

Installing KDE

I decided to install KDE again, although I would struggle to explain why, curiosity perhaps. I installed kde-core and it all just worked perfectly, with a neat first time wizard to handle the migration of configuration from KDE3.5 to KDE4, excellent work.

I used KDE4 for a few hours before returning to pekwm.

Conclusions

So far Squeeze has been flawless and yet another Debian dist-upgrade without a hitch. Well done Debian.

KDE looks great and seemed to work exactly as it ought. Over the few hours I encountered no problems whatsoever. But I do wish KDE would learn from some of the features of PekWM - I just love the left-mouse-click on the screen edge to move to the next window, I love the ability to group windows and I love the fact that you can resize windows to fill the available space.

I am not saying that all those features should be made the default in KDE, such matters are subjective, but they ought to at least be possible in KDE and as far as I can tell they are not. There is a screen edge option, but it works poorly, relying on you holding the mouse at the screen edge for a definable period of time.

• Virtualization With KVM On A Debian Squeeze Server

I have used KVM, but never with libvirt.  I understand that libvirt is a standard api for managing various virtualisation technologies, e.g. KVM, QEMU, Xen and others, giving you a common way of managing your guests regardless of the technology in use.

For more information please visit:

• Virtualization With KVM On A Debian Squeeze Server

To fix this I entered “about:plugins” in the address bar, and clicked “disable” against Flash. This results in Google Chrome falling back on the version of Flash installed in the operating system. If you do not have Flash installed, then in Debian you can install as follows:

Firstly ensure that the repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list include “non-free”, for example:

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian squeeze main contrib non-free

Then install Adobe Flash with:

$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

And you should now have a working Flash installation. I have tested You Tube and all seems to be well, but I will update this page if I find any issues.

By the way, I would obviously prefer to run Chromium, the open source version of Chrome, but at the moment the version in Squeeze is outdated, and there are no backports yet for Wheezy.

I’ve just bought a new HP N36L Microserver, for £210 with £100 cashback.  It came with a 250gb SATA, so I added a second 250gb SATA; so that I could have a simple software RAID array.  I also added 2gb of Crucial RAM.

When the server arrived, I was surprised to find it had RAID built into it, but my understanding is that this is FakeRAID and thus should be avoided at all costs.  If you were particularly interested in that  option, with particular reference to Windows Home Server (yikes) then this page may be helpful.

I plugged in my wonderful IODD ISO drive and selected Debian Squeeze AMD64 netinstall, and off I went.  When it came to the partitioning, you need to carry this out manually, in the following order:

• Partition both disks as follows:
  • Create boot primary partition (about 500mb)
    • Set mount as /boot and make bootable
  • Create partition using most of the rest of the first drive (e.g. 247gb)
    • Set partition as Use as physical volume for RAID
• Configure software RAID
  • Create MD Device, RAID1, 2 devices, 0 spare devices
  • Select the RAID partition on each drive
• Create Physical Volumes for LVM
  • Create volume group
  • Create suitable volumes for your systems, e.g. swap (2 x RAM, root (10GB or so), home (to your taste), usr (2gb+), var (2gb+), tmp (1gb+).
    • it is a good idea not to use the whole space, as the whole benefit to LVM is being able to then add available space into any volume
  • I also created a large volume for /var/lib/vz/private, as this will be an openvz server.
• Partition disks
  • Set each LVM volume to use the appropriate file system type, e.g. ext3 or ext4, and set the appropriate mountpoint, e.g. home should be /home etc, swap should be allocated to swap space etc

I found this howto on LVM + RAID for debian-installer most useful but, providing you follow the logical progression, it really is not as difficult as it seems.

After the partitioning, I continued with the installation, removing all options including “Standard System” from the software profiles; so that I basically installed a base system, which is how I prefer it.

Next I installed: sudo, GNU Screen, openssh-server, vim, fcheck, locales, localepurge, apt-file,  apt-show-versions and nullmailer (ssmtp is  better if your mailserver requires secure authentication).  Doubtless you have your own favourite packages to install!

Next step will be to configure as a small openvz server, and migrate the virtual machines off my old server (which I will be commissioning as a storage server).