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Debian Upgrades

Posted on 9 January 2024 by Rick

After putting it off for a long time, I began upgrading my Debian 11 systems to Debian 12. After reviewing the in-place upgrade process, I wrote scripts to handle each stage of the process. There’s probably a way to do it in one script, but I didn’t feel like messing with that.

The first script updates the current Debian installation. Then, after a reboot, the second script uses sed to replace all the isntances of bullseye with bookworm in /etc/apt/sources.list and in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bullseye.backports.list if it exists. The script also adds non-free-firmware where necessary, and if the backports list exists, renames it to bookworm.backports.list. Then it performs a full upgrade using the updated source lists. Finally, the third script confirms the upgrade by displaying the release and version information. Then it cleans the apt cache and removes orphaned packages.

Overall, the process has worked quite well for me. The only real problem I’ve come across so far was with my main laptop, an HP ElietBook 850 G3 with the i3 window manager. In a termnal window, I lose the half of the bottom line when the window is full. Applications run unside the terminal such as Micro and Bat look fine, but the bottom line of Htop is cutoff when it’s maximized. It only occurs on this particular laptop. The only change has been the upgrade to Bookworm, none of my configuration files have changed. Online searches have provided me with nothing useful.

I’ve got one more deskotp computer on which to do an in-place upgrade, my Gitea server. I’m going to hold off on that for a while until I get a feel for backing up the database. Maybe once I feel comfortable with that, I can do a complete rebuild of the system and provide it with a larger root partition or maybe just a single partition.

Other than that, I have an HP mini-PC that’s currently running Debian 11 with Cinnamon. That one was upgraded in-place from Debian 10. I plan to wipe it and do a fresh Debian 12 installation with i3wm. I also have two older laptops that are currently running BunsenLabs 11 which I’m considering changing to Debian and i3. BunsenLabs uses Openbox and after using a tiling window manager for a while, a floating window manager just doesn’t have much appeal. Plus, on those laptops, I really don’t need most of the applications and utilities that are included with the distro.

Filed under: Linux, Upgrade | Tagged: , , , |

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4 Responses

  1. Rick, on 9 January 2024 at 16:15 said:

    I found sort of a kludge workaround for the bottom of the terminal being cut off. I was able to force the entire prompt to by adding two newlines followed by \033[2A\](\n\n\[\033[2A\]) at the beginning of my bash prompt. The moved down two lines and back up two lines before printing the rest of the prompt. It should be noted that this only affects the bash prompt and has no effect on anything else displayed in the terminal. It’s a start. Maybe I will need to do a normal installation from the ISO and set everything else. For the time being, I think I can live with it.

  2. Rick, on 15 January 2024 at 17:02 said:

    I finally found a fix for the problem with the terminal window on the laptop, and it works for terminal applications too. The solution was to add a window rule to the i3 config enabling the initial kitty window as a floating window, then setting the initial window size in kitty.conf to be one line shorter.

    When I first tried it, it seemed to work but when I restarted i3, the Polybar didn’t display correctly and after a reboot, the weird Polybar came up, but i3 didn’t initiate and I wasn’t able to open a terminal. I was still able to SSH into it and restore the Kitty and i3 configuration files from last night’s backup. I reapplied the changes and it’s working.

    Here’s the change I made to ~/.config/i3/config:

    for_window [class=kitty] floating enable

    Change to ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf:

    remember_window_size no
initial_window_width 168c
initial_window_height 43c
  3. Rick, on 11 February 2024 at 13:43 said:

    I’ve been living with the changes to the kitty and i3 configurations for nearly a month and it continues to feel like makeshift hack. I’m stuck with my terminal stuck in a full-screen floating window. Other than a scratchpad which is itself a floating window, I can’t open another window in the same workspace. I can, but it will be underneath the original window, and therefore useless. Fortunately, Kitty allows me to spawn new terminal windows within the existing window, but it’s not quite the same as having another window, complete with gaps.

    I’ve been putting it off, but I’m going to do a fresh installation of Debian and i3 and see if the default configurations will work properly.

    Would I have the same problem with another terminal, such as Terminator?

  4. Rick, on 22 February 2024 at 13:36 said:

    I was about to reinstall Debian and i3 on the laptop, but I decided to take another look at my configurations. I moved my Polybar panel to the top of the screen, and commented out my previous changes to my i3 config and kitty.conf. As expected, this cut off half of the top line of the terminal.

    I took a look at the kitty documentation and decided to see what changing the window_padding_width setting would do. I found that setting it to 20 all around worked quite well. It’s not perfect, but I;ll mess around with it some more. At least now I don’t have my terminal in a floating window, so I can open other terminals or applications in that worksapce.

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