Fienix upgrade ruinied my system
Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2023 1:06 pm
I was running the older Fienix Soar so thought it could do with an update. It was about time as not only is it depreciated but I could never get printing to work and Synaptic was missing. It seemed to install fine but constantly had issues like the above I never fully resolved even when installing extra packages to fix.
In normal use it worked fine. But it was two releases behind. And thought a full update would be good.
I set about doing the usual apt-get update, upgrade and dist-upgrade. The upgrade appeared to be fine so I rebooted. But then I found an issue. The brisk-menu started crashing. I uninstalled and reinstalled it to no change. I then updated again and found some packages held back. So upgraded again and all packages were upgraded. In the process I got some errors on the Debian server as I had updated the night before so looks like the package list went stale overnight. Didn't know Debian ppc was kept so up to date.
Once all that was up to date with all package sources working I set about doing the dist-upgrade. Did another update and upgrade just to make sure as usual. So this came down the line and seemed to process fine.
However there were some messages about no space on device. I'm sure I had put it on a 20GB partition but need to look at that. I checked and there was some space so it was worrying. Just 60MB at one point before removing some files. But other packages updated fine so I logged out to restart.
Fienix loaded fine again but took a while to get to the desktop. Once there my icons are missing from the menu and even ones I had used did not show up in a search. I then loaded the Control Panel as it was the only app that showed in the menu. But it something was wrong with it. I click a button and it took almost ten seconds to load the edit panel up and then nothing in the window responded. After this I noticed that the HDD was flashing a lot indicating something was constantly reading or writing. I still use a "real" HDD so I can really notice the difference!
So is a full reinstall the only way to upgrade it? The system still still technically works but is in worse shape than ever. Perhaps I do the "trick" of installing over the top which can fix a broken system.
In normal use it worked fine. But it was two releases behind. And thought a full update would be good.
I set about doing the usual apt-get update, upgrade and dist-upgrade. The upgrade appeared to be fine so I rebooted. But then I found an issue. The brisk-menu started crashing. I uninstalled and reinstalled it to no change. I then updated again and found some packages held back. So upgraded again and all packages were upgraded. In the process I got some errors on the Debian server as I had updated the night before so looks like the package list went stale overnight. Didn't know Debian ppc was kept so up to date.
Once all that was up to date with all package sources working I set about doing the dist-upgrade. Did another update and upgrade just to make sure as usual. So this came down the line and seemed to process fine.
However there were some messages about no space on device. I'm sure I had put it on a 20GB partition but need to look at that. I checked and there was some space so it was worrying. Just 60MB at one point before removing some files. But other packages updated fine so I logged out to restart.
Fienix loaded fine again but took a while to get to the desktop. Once there my icons are missing from the menu and even ones I had used did not show up in a search. I then loaded the Control Panel as it was the only app that showed in the menu. But it something was wrong with it. I click a button and it took almost ten seconds to load the edit panel up and then nothing in the window responded. After this I noticed that the HDD was flashing a lot indicating something was constantly reading or writing. I still use a "real" HDD so I can really notice the difference!
So is a full reinstall the only way to upgrade it? The system still still technically works but is in worse shape than ever. Perhaps I do the "trick" of installing over the top which can fix a broken system.