Due to various reasons (including a looong internet outage for me) I did not finish my smxi upgrade from lenny to squeeze for about a month and a half.

Getting back to smxi I find its doing another half GB download (going on now as I write this) -- well fair enough considering squeeze is 'testing' and is expected to move fast.

However I am having some new issues most critical of which is that file systems seem to not be getting umounted properly on shutdown.

Any suggestions?
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This issue has nothing to do with smxi, first of all, and it's certainly not a developer issue.

Since you're not giving any further information about the state of your system, ie, have you run a successful:
aptitude full-upgrade
since your failed upgrade? I can't really tell you anything.

Run that command after running: aptitude update
assuming you are using aptitude and not apt-get, if apt-get, use apt-get.

All errors must be noted carefully and copied somewhere. Failure to mount the file system might mean that the new kernel failed to fully install, it's hard to say, reinstall the kernel, do the full-upgrade, then see what happens. Do not respond here until you have done that, and if you get errors, DO NOT JUST CONTINUE, fix the errors until you get no errors.
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The problem seems to have gone after insserv is fully converted to dependency based init
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Unfortunately, in the coming Lenny -> squeeze stable, the idea of a fairly seamless upgrade is going to see a lot of unhappy users. insserv failing and requiring manual intervention will be frequent, as will a host of other problems, the new udev/kernel issue as well will cause problems, and of course, the kde 3 -> 4 conversion will basically break every existing kde3 install in terms of user configurations, even if they use smxi to do it, so this is a major change in terms of usability and user friendly rolling release upgrades for Debian.

It would have taken a lot more scripting work in pre and post install scripts to handle these changes elegantly, I did some of them in smxi, but I don't see Debian implementing most of the methods I used. Look for Ubuntu gaining even more market share I'm sad to say, one of the primary advantages of Debian stable was clean upgrades, relatively, between major releases, that's going to be a problem this time around.

I've had to do manual removal of cruft, requiring a fairly in-depth understanding of how to debug and catch orphaned filed in Debian using dpkg tools, to allow the full insserv migration, and that removal was not scriptable or scalable, so we're looking at basically in some ways an end of the road for some unsupported users, or, if they are motivated, a reinstall in some cases, unfortunate... in the real world, average users do not reinstall their operating systems, they give up and buy new computers or whatever.
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Not exactly my experience

Ive a desktop running squeeze and a laptop running karmic.


The debian migration has been slow but not all that painful (at least partly thanks to this list)

Ubuntu has been a greater pain. With hardy I could not project onto a screen (pre- xrandr) With karmic pulseaudio has screwed up my sound (which is not a luxury for me -- I teach singing)
So Ive to choose:
Hardy -- no projector
karmic + pulse - esound -- sound stops working
karmic + esound - pulse -- my singing software (nted, timidity) works, everything else stops -- gnome, firefox etc

So I am seriously thinking of copying all my system (/ /usr /var etc) from desktop-squeeze to laptop and getting rid of karmic.
Ive done this before and the only issues I expect are:
- xorg.conf
- ethernet card details in udev need to be reset
- suitable kernel (desktop is intel duo-core, laptop is k7)

Oh and there is this new grub which I dont understand (and is poorly documented) but both ubuntu and debian seem to have chosen that!!
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I'm always interested in hearing realworld, direct, first hand accounts of problems, especially in Ubuntu land, which I don't use a lot of, so it's good to keep a balanced perspective.

Thanks for the feedback on your experiences.

Smxi was created to help smooth out issues in rolling release distributions, starting with Sid, and as such, it still works reasonably well I hope. the idea was to script fixes or information alerts to create a scalable support model using scripted solutions to implement fixes.

insserv was actually one of the first issues that I could not fix using scripting because of the general randomness of cruft that would block insserv from running.

Make sure you have actually cleaned all that cruft by running:
dpgk-reconfigure insserv
that will show if it is working smoothly. If it shows errors, you have to track each file that is blocking insserv and purge its owning package, if no owning package, then delete the file.

Check the grub forums here for grub 2 information, there's not a lot yet, but aus9 has created some documentation that he links to, so check his stuff out. Hint: it's a bigger pain to learn grub2, and grub2 isn't quite ready for prime time, but it's the new grub so that's life, grub1 is deprecated, but here's a hint:

aptitude install grub-legacy
will remove the grub metapackage and grub-pc, which is grub2, and leave you with a perfectly fine grub1, which will work for as long as nothing breaks in its dependencies in Debian. If you had grub2, you would need to reinstall grub to mbr, but remember, grub 1 doesn't support ext4.

Explicitly installing grub-legacy will leave you with grub 1, and grub will not remove grub1 and install grub-pc, aka grub 2. Or just get used to grub2, annoying as it is.
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