[SGVLUG] Upgrading on a slow connection

[David Lawyer]

Early this morning at 2am I finally finished updating my Linux,
getting the latest versions of software from Debian "testing",
including the 2.6.26 kernel.  I haven't done a clean install in over
10 years but have done an update about every year or so.  But with my
33.6k analog modem the "expected time to go" would read like 1d...
meaning it expects to take at least a day (24 hrs.) to download the
update using apt-get.  They actually call it an "upgrade".

Also, my ISP only allows one hour connect time before you are
disconnected.  Why does it take so long to get the upgrade?  A major
reason is that I'm downloading a lot of stuff I don't need.  Apt-get
showed it was intending to download about 50 drivers for video cards
only one of which I need for my video card.  Same problem with
modules: Most of the modules that come with the kernel are for
hardware I don't have.

The way it should work (at least for slow connections) is that before
downloading, the system detects your hardware and only downloads the
drivers needed for it.  Or it could ask you if you had a slow
connection and if so, ask for the make/models of the hardware you have
installed.  Also, you could specify that where there are choices of
dependencies to download, it would choose the "light" dependency
instead of the "heavy" one.  For example, exim4-daemon-light also
exists in a "heavy" rendition, which requires even more downloads of
dependencies to support it.

I was able to get apt-get to only download my video driver by using
the install command to update that driver and also updating the
xserver software.  Then apt-get no longer proposed to get all the
video drivers which are in the meta package xserver-xorg-video-all.
Similarly for exim4-daemon-light.  But this was a lot of bother and
there is likely still a lot of stuff I downloaded that I don't need,
like most of the kernel modules.

Another problem related to this is the large number of packages I have
installed that are obsolete and no longer needed because they are old
versions but are not automatically deleted since the version number
was included in the package name: example: libdb3, libdb4.1, libdb4.2,
etc.  It's mostly library packages that have this problem.  Is there
software to find and delete these?   One can try to delete them
manually using apt-get purge.  Before deletion, apt-get will show what
other packages will also be also deleted which implies that the
candidate for deletion was needed by another package.  Then one can
choose not to delete it.  But this is just too time consuming as I
have about 25 such library names each one of which has one or more
obsolete versions.  But sometimes a package will require an obsolete
version of another package.
 
I know there are some special distributions for old hardware but they
might miss out on the latest browsers, multimedia, etc.  If mainstream
Linux was easier to maintain on old computers then a lot of people
could get use out of free computers by installing Linux on computers
that people would otherwise discard.

I've lost my interest in promoting Linux and learning more about it,
but intend to keep using it for writing and maintaining my website.
That's one reason I don't show up at meetings.

Someone gave me a Athelon 64-bit dual-core PC with Windows on it and I
don't like it: too much power consumption and virus worries: it
crashed and I had to reinstall the system software and then download
patches from MS to update it.  I'm looking for a used monitor for it
as the one I had for it went blank and was very hot (something
overheated).  I may give the Windows PC to someone I know who want's
it.  It's also got problems with downloads on a slow modem: large
files that can't download within the 1 hr. limit by my ISP.  But this
isn't the place to discuss problems with MS.  What would happen if I
installed Vista on my 13-year-old, (48 MB mem.) PC?  I'll bet it
wouldn't work at all.

			David Lawyer