Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Upgrading from Squeeze to Wheezy using Cupt

I recently read about Cupt a rewritten apt-get replacement that apparently would be more suitable for low end machines. Well it's not specifically written for low end machines, I guess it's just less resource demanding.

Anyway I decided to try upgrading my old Toshiba 320CDS from Debian Squeeze to Wheezy using cupt. Upgrading in Cupt comes in a couple of different flavors. I decided to go with the one I know best:
sudo cupt update 
sudo cupt dist-upgrade 

Actually all things went fairly smooth  apart from conky breaking the upgrade halfway through. I resolved this minor issue by just removing conky (sudo cupt remove conky) when the upgrade broke and then just start the upgrade from scratch (or whatever state my system was left in).

When the upgrade was done, everything seemed to be ok, but at reboot I was dropped to busybox...(sigh) as usual. This happens because I have to used the ide-generic kernel module to boot from my ide disks.
I typed in:
modprobe ide-generic 

But my system said that no module with that name was available... (this is where I panicked and retyped that about twenty times trying different combinations of ide, -,_ and generic). Naturally that didn't accomplish anything so I googled a bit and found that ide-generic had been removed from the kernel packages and been replaced by pata_legacy.ko
So instead I tried:
modprobe pata-legacy 

The module loaded and my drives were recognized. I hit CTRL-D and the boot resumed.

As soon as my system was up and running I replaced ide-generic with pata-legacy in /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
and issued:
sudo update-initramfs -u 

...and rebooted without a hitch. Well actually, first I replaced it with pata-generic, which of course is very wrong and got dropped to busybox again. But I will never admit to that. ;)

Also I must say that cupt feels a tad bit snappier than apt-get.

No comments:

Post a Comment