I had downloaded a couple of programs from the BBC with get_iplayer and them tried viewing them with VLC and the video did not work. If I fiddled with the settings, VLC seemed to hang. I have now tried viewing with Kodi and these programs display correctly. I believe that VLC was working correctly before I upgraded to Beowulf.

Geoff

After the upgrade I tidied up the old version of Postgresql using Synaptic, removing :-

This produced an error message, but when I repeated it to capture the message, it just worked!

pg_lsclusters 

as root :-

/etc/init.d/postgresql status

/etc/init.d/postgresql start

then as me :-

pg_lsclusters

Geoff

The section about setting the path for Postgresql is unnecessary. There are a set of wrapper scripts in /usr/bin which sort out the version for you, so that you do not need to add anything special to your path.

Geoff

Make sure that there is enough disc space!

If you have /var as a separate partition you may need to tidy the apt cache :-

apt-get autoclean

If /boot is a separate partition you may need to remove a few old kernels.

Apt is reasonably resiliant and does check the disk space and will not run if there is not enough, although grub does not spot the lack of space in /boot until the upgrade is under way.

Wine and i386

There do seem to be difficulties with Wine and i386 on an amd64 installation.

If you do not need it, remove it. If you do need it, study this :-

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2987

upower

I think that there is no alternative to manually forcing the version of upower as the old version has "1:" in front of the version number, which makes it look newer that the real new one! It therefore looks like a downgrade, but this is what you should accept.

Postgresql

I have included the path to the Postgresql commands in my .profile and this needed to be updated for the new version so that .profile includes the lines :-

if [ -d "/usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="/usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin:$PATH"
fi

Geoff

I had a review of my earlier efforts :-
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2752

I updated /etc/apt/sources.list replacing ascii with beowulf and commented out entries apart from the main one and updates and security.

I then tried the upgrade :-

apt update
apt list --upgradable
apt full-upgrade

This stopped for lack of space.

I have /var on a rotating disc and hadn't cleaned up! I needed :-

apt-get autoclean

Which gave me 7.4G on /var

apt full-upgrade

This then proceeded, but produced quite a lot of warnings, but I carried on anyway.

Unpacking proceeds...

so I tried fix broken:-

apt --fix-broken install

this proceeds until :-

apt --fix-broken install

It appears that rc-update has installed the runlevels, but openrc is reported as not configured yet.

I ran synaptic and forced the version of upower to 0.99.10-1 and also fix broken packages.

apt full-upgrade

then proceeds to 97%

apt --fix-broken install

So it looked like /boot was out of space, so I used synaptic to remove kernel 3.10.

apt --fix-broken install

So, using synaptic I told it to upgrade elogind and it says that it will remove :-

I let it do this and then

apt full-upgrade

now only reports stuff that can be removed by apt autoremove and seems to have completed the upgrade. I then wanted to check that Postgresql was ok.

Postgresql

Following the upgrade message about postgresql I tried :-

su - postgres
reindexdb --all

pg_lsclusters 

pg_upgradecluster 9.6 main
Error: target cluster 11/main already exists

I went back over what I did last time and did this :-

pg_dropcluster --stop 11 main
pg_lsclusters

pg_upgradecluster 9.6 main

pg_lsclusters 

This appeared to be correct so as me :-

psql --no-align --pset=footer=off --file=events_view.sql

(Where the .sql file is my report generating sql) and it produces the correct data.
LibreOffice Base also connects correctly. So, I am happy that part of the upgrade is ok.

Other stuff

running emacs produces :-

but it does run.

I could run synaptic from the menu and authorise myself.

Claws-mail still works, but the fancy html viewer has gone.
In its place you can load the Dillo viewer under configuration>plugins
I can't see the liteHTML viewer... it is in Ceres.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=3119

Chromium does not want to run. It needs the sandbox :-

apt install chromium-sandbox

VNC seems to work.

lxqt-sudo works.

Can I logout and back in?
Yes, but the login was very slow. The windowing environment eventually came up but there was no panel.
I could switch to tty1 with ctrl-alt-f1 and had to :-

apt install lxqt-panel

I was then able to get the panel running with Openbox.
I then tried to reboot but had to get a root window and run

/sbin/shutdown -r now

After the reboot, I was able to log in with no delay and the panel came up as expected. Also the errors about /run/user had gone away.

Following the reboot, I was able to shut the machine down via the lxqt-panel.

Also, despite some warning during the upgrade about Grub can't load initrd for Xen after upgrade to Buster, I was also able to boot up under the Xen hypervisor. I need to check a message about the cpu security features with Xen.

All of the basic stuff seems to be working nicely.

Geoff

edited to correct the sequence of Postgresql commands

As I have a small Postgresql database on my desktop machine, I wanted to check that this would be ok when I upgrade. I also use LibreOffice Base for adding new info to the database using SDBC.

I installed Postgresql on my Beowulf laptop, along with libreoffice-sdbc-postgresql.
On the ASCII desktop, I dumped the database as user "postgres" as given in the man page with :-

pg_dumpall -c > db.out

The "-c" adds commands to clean out anything in the new database before adding the dumped data.

On the Beowulf laptop, as user postgres, I restored this data with :-

psql -f db.out postgres

This worked and having also copied over the .odb file I tried accessing the database from LibreOffice Base, which also "just worked".

This has given me confidence that should there be any problems with the upgrade, that I have a work-a-round.

Geoff

Using openrc-init to replace SysV init completely is a bit more complicated, not helped by a bug in version 0.40 which doesn't sequence things correctly. This has been fixed by version 0.41.2, although this does not appear to be available via Deian/Devuan.

It is possible to compile v 0.41.2 and move in openrc-init, as detailed at :-

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=15539#p15539

It is also necessary to use openrc-shutdown instead of shutdown.

I notice that openrc has moved on to version 0.42.1. I have not yet tried this and, indeed, have only tried openrc-init from 0.41.2. If Devuan is getting OpenRC from Debian, then I wonder how quickly it is likely to get updated. Might we need to get it directly from the authors?

Geoff

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2788

I must now check whether this info needs updating. ;-)

Geoff

On my laptop, under Beowulf, OpenRC ships with a replacement for SysV init, and I am using this replacement. I cannot recall whether this is how it is installed, or whether I had to configure it to do that. Anyway, this affects how the system id shut down. If you just run shutdown, OpenRC seems to notice that things are stopping and seems to restart them. There is a replacement /usr/bin/openrc-shutdown which works correctly. There is just the question of how you run it from the GUI. I have hacked up a very crude pop-up with xmessage, which doesn't look very good, but does work. I am just checking what I did, as it was some time ago!

Geoff

Geoff

The plan was to move over to LXQt from LXDE, whilst still under ASCII and then ensure that the policykit stuff was set up correctly.

I currently have the following installed :-

This is working with LXDE/Lxdm. It also seems to work ok with LXQt/Lxdm.

Moving to LXQt works, but it did take quite a bit of fiddling to get it running as I like it. I use spacefm instead of pcmanfm, which also looks after the desktop wallpaper. To get this running I went into Preferences>LXQt settings>Session settings

Under Basic Settings, I turned off Desktop, which is the module for pcmanfm, with the other modules all selected.
Under Autostart LXQt Autostart I added spacefm with the command

spacefm --desktop

Under Global Autostart I have turned off :-

(Power Manager is the xfce one - the LXQt one is set in Basic settings)

My desktop has wired ether, so I am not using the network managers,

In order to configure the Panel, you can right click on the panel and select Configure Panel.

Setting up the Quick launch widget, involves dragging the desired programs from the start menu and dropping them on the Quick launch widget.

The wallpaper is set up by running spacefm and going to View>preferences>Desktop.

At this point, if I run lxqt-sudo rxvt -rv& it produces this warning (but still runs) :-

I have used LC_MEASUREMENT = "en_NZ.UTF-8" in order to get metric measurements.
This warning does not appear under LXDE, but instead reports (and still works) :-

QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 651, resource id: 16779311, major code: 40 (TranslateCoords), minor code: 0

Using Synaptic, if I try and mark libpolkit-backend-elogind-1-0 for installation it reports that it will also install libpolkit-gobject-elogind-1-0, while removing :-

I did the installation with :-

apt update
apt install libpolkit-backend-elogind-1-0

which then carried out the same things as Synaptic indicated. /var/log/apt/history.log reports :-

I have rebooted the machine and everything seems to work nicely. There are a couple of pop-ups which appear.
One is at login, when it reports that it is unable to bind the keys Control+Alt+D.
Another appears at shutdown but it disappears very quickly as the machine does indeed shutdown and I am unable to see what it says!

/var/log/messages reports :-

/var/log/auth.log  reports :-

The machine is currently running ASCII well with LXdm/LXQt and elogind. I will do some checking before I look at the upgrade to Beowulf itself...

Geoff