Debian Upgrades

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.

i3 on Bookworm

I’ve been planning to upgrade my Debian systems since Bookworm was released earlier this summer. Of course, I plan to maintain i3wm on those systems that already have it, and I spent a lot of time researching what I needed to be done to accomplish that.

Drew Grif’s (JustAGuy Linux) video and scripts were very beneficial in helping me get i3 up and running on Debian 11, and I was thrilled wihen he came out with a video where he installed several window managers on Debian 12. I cloned his scripts from his GitHub repository and studied them, but found a ittle difficult to separate the the i3 specific files from the rest. I’m not really interested in the other windown managers, although I may install all of them in a VM or on hardware, to check them out.

What I ultimately decided to do, was to take my current install script and update it to install i3 on Bookworm. I added the appropriate Polybar file, and make the necessary adjustments to the i3 configuration files. Then I upgraded one of my test laptops, a Dell Latitude E-6500, installing Debian 12 on the root partition and keeping the home partition. It took some work, but I got Polybar working with it, and it’s running great. I’ve since updated my local i3-Debian repository, so I think I’m ready to try it on another system. This time I’ll probably do a clean install and then restore my home folder from the backup.

I was able to install Polybar on my HP Elitebook laptop which is working out great. I’m not sure if the current version of Polybar actually supports applets in the taskbar , but I have them loaded by my i3 autostart script after Polybar has loaded, and it seems to be working okay. The Elitebook is a production machine and will probably among the last to be upgrade.

It’s strange that I can’t find Polybar in the Debian 11 repositories on the other systems running Bullseye. That’s not a big deal since the Bumblebee-Status bar works well on those systems, and they’ll all be upgraded to Bookworm before too long.

Drew Grif’s videos and repositories:

• i3-gaps Installation using shell script on Debian Bullseye minimal. – YouTube
• GitHub – drewgrif/i3gaps-debian
• Speed Challenge: Install 5 Customized Window Managers on Debian Bookworm – YouTube
• GitHub – drewgrif/bookworm-scripts
• GitHub – drewgrif/dotfiles: current configuration files

Coming Upgrades

Debian 12 Bookworm has been out for about a month , but I haven’t installed it on anything yet. I haven’t even upgraded any of my Bullseye systems. I found a YouTube video by Drew Grif on the JustAGuy Linux channel that was very helpful. In his video, Drew install five different window managers, i3 among them. I’ve been looking at his script and trying to figure what what files go with each window manager and if I can separate which ones I need for i3. He’s also using Polybar as his status bar which I’m familar with. Maybe I should use his installation scripts and install all of them on a system. Maybe I’ll find that I like one of the others better.

I have been adding and deleting files from his installation script to fit my needs. Today I created new repositories on my Gitea server, cloned them to my main computer, and copied the files to them. Now I’ll be able to modify the scripts and configuration files, and track the changes using git. Having a “fork” of Drew’s repository on my Gitea server will enable me to clone the repositories to a new installation.

I’ve been seeing a lot of of good reviews of Debian 12, and I’m looking forward to upgrading from Bullseye, particularly with window managers. I’m also looking forward to LMDE 6 when it comes out. Now that Linux Mint has released Mint 21.2, LMDE 6 will hopefully be out in a few months.

I’ll probably be upgrading my Mint systems before too long once the inplace upgrade procudures are in place. From what I’ve seen, most of the new features are cosmetic or things I don’t really use. There really hasn’t been much in Mint 21 that wows me. The HP ProBooks that I’d been running Mint 20.x on without much problem haven’t been performing nearly as well with 21.x. They’re running noticeable slower. One of those laptops is a “production” machine that I use daily. To help it out, I installed an SSD and that has helped. I also had an HP USDT that’s a dedicated media system and Mint 21 slowed it down considerably. I ended up installing Debian 11 with i3 on that.

I realize that most of my computers are older, acquired during refresh projects. It’s been five years since I worked on one those projects. Most of the machine have third or fourth generation i5 processors, I can’t expect great performance out of them. Maybe it’s time to start acquiring newer old hardware.

This is a bit off the subject, but the HP ProBook that I use a lot seemed to be running a little warm, so I opened it up to take a look. It’s a bit old, so I figured it might be time to put some fresh thermal paste on the CPU. I pulled out the fan and the heatsink, cleaned everything up, applied new paste, and put it all back together. It’s now running several degrees cooler now, still a bit warm but I think this model tends to run warm . It was nice that I didn’t need to completely disassemble it like the service manual wanted me to.

Links for Drew Grif’s

• Speed Challenge: Install 5 Customized Window Managers on Debian Bookworm
• GitHub – drewgrif/bookworm-scripts
• GitHub – drewgrif/dotfiles: current configuration files