Code formatting messed up...

[Jonathan Busby]

(11-12-2018 07:49 PM)SammysHP Wrote:  

(11-12-2018 04:05 PM)Jonathan Busby Wrote:  I'm hesitant to issue an "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade" as I'm afraid my system will be borked. Maybe I can just upgrade the fonts package.

A bit off-topic, but you should update your system as often as possible. Not only does that fix security issues early, it also makes it easier to determine the source of any errors after updating (which should be a really rare case). Debian is rather stable, so updates fix only minor issues. Similar distros like Ubuntu/Mint tend to include more bleeding-edge versions of common packages, but big issues after updates are rare as well.

Well, I've been running out of RAM, although I do have a cron job that executes every 15 minutes and backs up my home directory to an external drive. The reason I've been running out of RAM is that this Linux system had a Linux Mint install with a ZFS root and I experienced a kernel panic in the ZFS driver stack and I'm still trying to recover my data ( note to others : if you're using ZFS on Linux, be careful with the "dedup" option ). I don't want to reboot because then I'll have to re-install a bunch of tools and other software.

Quote:Partial upgrades (running "apt-get update" before "apt-get install" without "apt-get dist-upgrade") on the other hand may cause some trouble (binaries linked against different versions, moved/renamed files etc).

Well, in my case, I don't want to upgrade yet as I'm running out of RAM and I'm afraid that an update may use up too much memory in the ramdisk and cause this system to bork itself.

Jonathan