So the Debian developers upgraded each and every image from ‘testing’ to ‘stable’ by now, or from ‘Stretch’ to ‘Buster’ to stay with their names. I tried the method of writing such a Debian Live image to my USB stick like mentioned in https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb – and it worked. Booted it and selected localization support, and boom – I have German:
In fact I am writing this from Debian Live right now, and so the first thing I learned is that the keyboard is still English. Or American. But a quick and simple reconfiguration – without logoff or anything – changed that:
It even has a very cool picture of the keyboard:
So you could work like this if it has to be (like on a machine borrowed from someone else). Very good job, in fact this is excellence again. Learning new things each minute I’m spending with this. And of course you can still access your local drive(s) if you have any, or install Debian from within this Live image – very cool.
First I didn’t want to do it right away, but then I decided to just upgrade my machine to Debian 10 aka “Buster” (named after a character in Toy Story as always) today. So welcome Buster:
For those of you who maybe have never done anything like this, you should probably read the chapter about upgrading in its handbook. For me, expecting nothing but excellence from my favourite free software team, I just updated my /etc/apt/sources.list, followed by a ‘sudo apt update’ and ‘sudo apt upgrade’ – and that was it.
Now I have to check what has changed. Of course Gnome and about every other software package is different from before, and of course Wayland looks and feels a bit different from X.Org – but time will tell.
Last week Thursday evening after the school party our car broke down – the first time after 17 years and 182.000+ km. Turned out that the ignition coils needed to be replaced with new ones, plus a few other things. And as always, our car dealer gave us a replacement while they had ours in their garage, and this time it was a nice blue “Yaris Hybrid Y20 Club”, which looks like this:
What a fun car! And more than enough to go to work each and every day, really. Could get used to that one. But I’m still happy that we have ours back by now, and that it’s running like a new one. Best car we ever had.
The hard drive in the computer is ready as well, and I took the 2TB drive out as planned, with no issues at all. Except the Windows 10 feature update 1903 which killed grub, the boot loader of my Debian partition. The thing is that this should have never happened at all – I have an UEFI system, and operating systems aren’t supposed to overwrite each others boot sectors anymore. Seems that someone at Microsoft screwed up big time, and so I had to repair my Linux. Again.
But by now I’m typing this on my normal system again, onto which I also got the possibly last upgrades before the switch from Debian 9 “Stretch” to Debian 10 “Buster”. But I’ll try Buster from USB stick first. Not that I won’t trust it, but I’m too busy at the moment to just mess around with my computer.
Again, as always, thanks for reading. And good night for now.
Over at home I’m slowly running into disk space problems – our machines all have 2TB drives for our /home directories, the NAS has two mirrored ones. And for me doing lots of photography since 2009, and music since about two years, and now videos of others making music, I was slowly approaching limits (I have about 1.6TB occupied).
So I checked prices, and SSDs are still a bit too expensive in these sizes – I have a 256GB SSD for the operating systems (Debian Linux and Windows 10), but as a replacement for my 2TB Seagate Barracuda I ordered a 4TB WD Red hard drive which is in the Top Ten of the most searched drives on Geizhals, and which is affordable (got mine for under 100€ including shipping), and according to the guys over at Heise, also nice and cool and silent enough to be built into a typical desktop PC.
It arrived yesterday, so I already formatted it with GPT (instead of MBR which is legacy and which can’t address more than 2TB), and during the night I copied everything from my Barracuda to the new Red drive (a simple one-liner under Linux, easy and reliable as always).
As always, thanks for reading. And if you want more tips like this one with the change of /etc/fstab, consider bookmarking of LXer.com where I find articles like the one mentioned above all of the time. Oh, and in the sense of a full disclosure: I’m still a member of the team over there…