Re: Updating to woody from CD's

[Andreas <an...@po...>]

Hello David

> Hi,
> I have been unsuccessful getting a 2.4.? kernal to work with my
> system.(A1200+PPC+BVision). PCI probe always causes a panic.
> I can run 2.2.10 but cannot seem to get woody to update from my CD's.
> This is what I am doing, any help would be great. 
> Installing woody straight from the Cd's causes the clock to read 1902
> causing errors to be reported on all the packages, saying the date is
> in the future. I decided to start again.

Hmm, looks like the system gets dazzled by the fact that the packages have
newer dates than the system clock. I guess your hardware clock is gone. Maybe this
problem is a no-brainer: directly after booting into the installer switch to
console 2 into the shell (by pressing alt-F2) or pick the "start a shell" option from the installer
menu (one of the entries at the very bottom of the menu, i.e. you have to
scroll down a lot). Then you type

# date 0904040002

or

# date -s 0904040002

for today's date. The format is as follows 0904: month day, 0400: 4 a.m., 02:
year. And, yes, you have to type it as I did above, the whole string without
spaces!

This should set the system date correctly. Then you can start the
installation by choosing the first menu entry (to switch back to console one
type alt-F1). If you started the shell from the installer menu, theres a hint
on top of it how to exit it.

After the first reboot, you have to do it again of course, before the installation
continues (again, switch consoles).

> I can install a fully working system using my original 2.2r3 CD's.
> (not XFree4)
> When I change my sources list to my new CD set, things start to go
> wrong. I have access to all the packages but when I
> "apt-get upgrade" I have constant dependancy problems that will not be
> put right and I get errors saying that important packages are about
> to be deleted, so I need to confirm that this is ok. I them cancel
> the installation.

# apt-get update
# apt-get dis-upgrade

should do the trick, as Alan pointed out, after changing sources.list. And, yes,
core packages have to be removed, as there are newer ones coming in from
woody. But, try the thing
above with the date setting by hand, this should save you the hassel of this
time consuming two stage installation with potato!

But, if you really want to go all the way from potato to woody, than do not
install any extra packages during potato install, i.e. leave tasksel and
dselect out, do no apting (i.e. do not install anything like XFree86 or gnome,
etc), but directly update and then install all the extra
packages you need (e.g. XFree86, gnome, etc). This will smoothen your update a
lot!!

> Am I going about this in the wrong way or do I _need_ a 2.4.? kernal
> for this upgrade to work.

No, guess not. Plain vanilla i386 woody installation goes with 2.2.x.

> Does woody work with a 2.2.10 kernal?

It should, yes.

If the date/time problem lasts, you should set the time every time you boot
into the system right after startup! If you're geek, you cut out the command
in the boot scripts, where the system updates the software clock from the
hardware clock and writes the time from the soft clock back to the hardware
clock on shutdown. Instead of, you install some kind of command which writes
the current time into a file on shutdown, maybe something like

    date > /root/savedtime

and on startup reads it in with

    cat /root/savedtime | date -s

(beware, no idea if this works like that, I just made it up from now). If
you politely ask folks on debian-user (or debian-devel) to tell you how to do such cool
scripting, and which files you have to cover and how the correct syntax goes,
I guess they are happy to provide you with the answers. Or you maybe just ask
about how to handle a system without working internal clock!

PS: There are some good sites on the net which cover amiga hardware clock
battery replacement, in english, and with pics. Just google for it (maybe I
find the link sometime again).

-- 
Regards,
Andi