Notes-to-self on a Debian upgrade

[kaberett]

I remembered from last time that several of these points were trivial to resolve but I didn't remember how they were trivial to resolve and my wry comments didn't actually include details. ERGO.

• Not Sid.
  
• Downgrades are a nice idea but frequently get Stuck.
  
• For entirely baffling reasons, the way to boot from the grub prompt was to follow the standard set of instructions with no USB drives and a CD inserted -- mysteriously, correctly pointing at hd1/hd2 didn't play ball, but once the relevant partition was on hd0 it was fine.
  
• update-grub meant it worked on reboot.
  
• You always want to install network-manager. Its absence is usually the problem with wifi.
  
• Per the wiki, the touchpad (even though it's ALPS, yes) is sorted out by installing xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.
  
• Installed python3. Attempted to install veusz-1.25 from source. It did not. Installed pip. Installed sip. veusz setup claimed it could not see pip. -- offs, veusz-1.21 (from Debian repository) claims I'm missing python-astropy and python-sampy. -astropy is trivially fixable, -sampy is not.
  
  • okay let's try doing this the hard way.
    
  • installed sip .tar.gz and unpacked using python3 (python3 configure.py)
    
  • ... ffs. sudo apt-get install build-essentials, because apparently g++ wasn't a thing.
    
  • apt-get install python3-dev (and also python-dev for good measure)
    
  • make ran!
    
  • so did sudo make install!
    
  • okay now it's time to do the same wretched process for PyQt4 apparently.
    
  • sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt4
    
  • sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev
    
  • (inside unpacked PythonQt4 folder) python3 configure-ng.py; make; sudo make install
    
  • (inside veusz folder) python3 setup.py build (holy shit it worked)
    
  • sudo python3 setup.py install (... wORKED???)
    
  • ... running veusz gets me "the sip module implements API v11.0 to v11.3 but the [WTF-8] module requires API v12.1"
    
  • see here: did apt-get remove on the repository packages, and redid sudo make install for both sip and PyQt4. VEUSZ NOW LOADS. For my next trick, I will work out how to get it into the bloody main menu.
  
  
• sudo apt-get install mate-menu
  
• system-config-printer might have been useful but just see SystemPrinting and do the obvious

Comments

[sporky_rat]

There's a saying among the A&S folks in my kingdom: 'Documentation or you're gonna cry later'.
(Not where I expected that saying to end, but I like it better.)