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Downgrading From Wheezy to Squeeze

I just upgraded my squeeze to wheezy only to have a bunch of problems. Now I want to downgrade back to squeeze. To upgrade I changed everything in my /etc/apt/sources.list from 'squeeze' to 'wheezy' and ran 'aptitude dist-upgrade'. Is it possible to go back without reinstalling?

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Originally Posted by Bradj47 (Post 4312305)

AFAIK this is not possible. I was in a similar situation and just ended up reinstalling squeeze.

It is *possible*,see the link here:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/de...cy_downgrading

Make sure you backup anything critical on the machine before trying this,as you could potentially break your system.
You have been warned.;)

Trooper is correct, it is possible BUT you have to weigh up if the hassle is worth it or would you be better off doing a clean reinstall.

Also, no matter what you do make sure you back up everything you need.

Quicker and easy just to reinstall.

Or tell us what problems and just fix them, since chances are they can be easily fixed. Or keep upgrading and go to unstable/sid. :)

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Originally Posted by craigevil (Post 4312934)

Quicker and easy just to reinstall.

Or tell us what problems and just fix them, since chances are they can be easily fixed. Or keep upgrading and go to unstable/sid. :)

Now that is the kind of thinking that I like.

Changes in Wheezy respectively gnome3

I have similar experiences: Freezes of the entire system like in the early times with SUSE 5.2. Many things are not working as supposed or you have to relearn all with gnome3. That is not what many people would like to have. If I would have know the problems which come up with all that, I wouldn't have done the upgrade. I think, the stability of the system is far from being ready for use. It is not the Debian distribution I am used to for many years.

I cannot understand, why to link windowmanager so deep into the system that you simply cannot change e.g. to gnome2 if you like it? Why should gnome3 almost slow to freeze what a service of it starts "gs"?

The new design of gnome3 is a new style which needs to be worked into and it is so different, that it is like a different window manager. It is a question if people will like it. Wrong is, to force people to use new window managers if you are fine and well experienced with the old and manybe fully personalized one which then is for the trash.

The markting group of Debian here made not a brilliant job in this point. Forcing people to learn to drive the car new is Mircrosoft philosophy and I am sure it is not the right way. Give people options what they want to use rather than dictating it.

If the window managers are so deeply linked into the system that a change is not possible, then it think, the design is faulty. Window managers simply should manage windows and that as fast as possible. E.g. confirgure back the known style to resize windows by "Alt + left mouse button" takes more than half a second where you already are in the way of moving but which didn't take place due to the delay. Depending on the window content, it is not possible to work on all areas either. So in daily work, it fails in the frist try to about 50%. Just annoying. There are much more what I am currently collecting and will post later when I have it all together. Really, my old CTWM configuration I used for years had all the central features one needs and was even faster on a 100 MHz pentium PC than gnome3 on a 2.6 GHz dual core.

Quote:

Originally Posted by snajak (Post 4991860)

I cannot understand, why to link windowmanager so deep into the system that you simply cannot change e.g. to gnome2 if you like it?

You can install different DEs/WMs just like you did before on Debian. There is a simple reason why you can't change back to Gnome 2: It is not maintained anymore and therefore has no place in the Debian repositories.

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Nobody forced you. It is your obligation to inform yourself about changes before doing the upgrade. The release notes clearly state the change to Gnome 3.

Quote:

The markting group of Debian here made not a brilliant job in this point. Forcing people to learn to drive the car new is Mircrosoft philosophy and I am sure it is not the right way. Give people options what they want to use rather than dictating it.

Again, you are still free to use any supported DE/WM you like. If you liked Gnome 2 I would recommend to try XFCE. Besdies that, I doubt that there is a marketing group in the Debian team.

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Window managers simply should manage windows and that as fast as possible.

Different DEs/WMs exist for different purposes and different user groups. If you are not happy with Gnome 3 use something different, like XFCE or KDE, simple as that.

Quote:

E.g. confirgure back the known style to resize windows by "Alt + left mouse button" takes more than half a second where you already are in the way of moving but which didn't take place due to the delay. Depending on the window content, it is not possible to work on all areas either. So in daily work, it fails in the frist try to about 50%. Just annoying. There are much more what I am currently collecting and will post later when I have it all together. Really, my old CTWM configuration I used for years had all the central features one needs and was even faster on a 100 MHz pentium PC than gnome3 on a 2.6 GHz dual core.

This sounds like a configuration issue with your graphics hardware. You should open a new thread with all relevant info for that issue.

Quote:

Originally Posted by snajak (Post 4991860)

The new design of gnome3 is a new style which needs to be worked into and it is so different, that it is like a different window manager. It is a question if people will like it. Wrong is, to force people to use new window managers if you are fine and well experienced with the old and manybe fully personalized one which then is for the trash.

The markting group of Debian here made not a brilliant job in this point. Forcing people to learn to drive the car new is Mircrosoft philosophy and I am sure it is not the right way. Give people options what they want to use rather than dictating it.

You cant blame debian for gnome 2.X not being in debian 7. The gnome project discontinued gnome 2.X, which is why its not in debian 7.

You have the option to use gnome-fallback with gnome 3. Or you can install Xfce. Or you can install MATE with is a fork of gnoem 2.X (requires adding a 3rd party repo last time I checked).

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Originally Posted by TobiSGD (Post 4991870)

Besdies that, I doubt that there is a marketing group in the Debian team.

There was, its been merged with the publicity team-

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Marketing

NB, this page is outdated, the Marketing team has been merged with the Publicity team in August 2010 as per this DPL announcement.

http://wiki.debian.org/Marketing

I dont think its really the fault of debian 'marketing' anyway. From everything I know about debian, they would expect users with expereicen to read the release notes...and/or deal with the fallout if they failed to read them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cascade9 (Post 4991887)

You have the option to use gnome-fallback with gnome 3. Or you can install Xfce. Or you can install MATE with is a fork of gnoem 2.X (requires adding a 3rd party repo last time I checked).

For Debian 7 (Wheezy) MATE will always be a 3rd party repository. For Debian 8 (Jessie) MAte will most probably have official recognition, there are some packages in Testing already and issues such as gtk3 support and old libraries are being sorted through right now.