Performiing miracles is the normal operation mode in Debian

I was running a Debian Squeeze system. By installing the proprietary NVIDIA driver from Nvidia I really had messed up this system long ago. It did run, but any changes in glx or vdpau had been impossible due to version and dependency problems. Too long to explain here but it was a mess and I did it myself.

Now I was forced to upgrade by the Evil itself. They made Skype 4.0 obsolete, and Skype 4.3 depended on many libraries not available in Squeeze.

So there I went with a dist-upgrade to wheezy. Recall the video driver installation was messed up beyond comprehension.

Debian needed to download 3.1 GB of archives, and upgraded beautifully. With the exception of one (glx) library which it refused to overwrite. Removing this library by hand removed this error. After a reboot I had a fully functional system again, including a new kernel and the correct video driver.

This is nothing short of a miracle. The Debian maintainers did an incredible job by fixing a broken system during an upgrade. I know many distros which do not show this performance during a clean install. Well done.

jlinkels

That's a cool story. It might be time for me to look at Debian again as a secondary distro (after Slackware, of course).

There are few distros matching Slackware, I know

jlinkels

I think the Debian devs do an excellent job. It amazes me that child distros can take such a solid system, that does upgrade as your example suggests and "just works" even without proprietary firmware on so many system, spend 6 months or so and totally screw it up. It's like the old adage "if it ain't broke don't fix it". Debian isn't broken and it works damn well.