On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 09:51:08AM +1100, Jason White wrote:

Mark Trickett <marktrickett@bigpond.com> wrote:

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I have chosen to install Debian (6.0) on the fresh desktop PC, and on a later Acer laptop. I invoked the Evolution backup on this laptop, then restored on the desktop, never having set up Evolution prior. It now will not recognise the analog modem ppp connection. I expect to have to edit config files and get ppp to set up as the default routing,

you could try running 'pppconfig' (as root) from the command line, but check whether your new laptop can even talk to the modem first: (note: all of the following assumes your modem is a standard serial modem connected to an old-fashioned 9-port or 25-port serial port. If it plugs into a USB port, then it will be using a USB serial port, the 'usbserial' module will be loaded, and the device name will be something like /dev/ttyUSB0 - run 'grep ttyUSB /var/log/dmesg' to find it) first, check whether the serial port devices are in /dev (should be /dev/ttyS0 to /dev/ttyS3 by default). it is possible (but unlikely IMO) that the newer kernel has changed the order of serial port detection so that, for example, ttyS0 is now ttyS1...so if your old ppp config is expecting the modem to be on ttyS0, it should be changed to talk on ttyS1. debian compiles the standard serial driver with CONFIG_SERIAL_8250=y rather than CONFIG_SERIAL_8250=m, i.e. directly into the kernel, not as a module (otherwise serial wouldn't be available as a console during boot, which is still very useful for some machines, including VMs), so there's no point using lsmod to check if the serial module is loaded - instead run 'grep -i serial: /var/log/dmesg' and you should see something like: [ 0.997566] Serial: 8250/16550 driver, 4 ports, IRQ sharing enabled also, install a serial terminal program like minicom and check to make sure that your computer can even talk to the modem. select a serial port device, set the baud rate, etc, and then hit enter a few times in the terminal for the modem to auto-detect your baud rate (if set to do so) and type "AT". it should respond OK. then try ATI0 (up to ATI9) for different information queries. if you get gibberish as a result, it's connected OK but you have the wrong baud rate - set it to the highest rate that both your modem and your computer will support (e.g. 115200) it's been a long, long time since i had to mess with modems so that's pretty much exhaused my memory of modem diagnostics without doing some reading and testing.

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there are some settings that came over and are inappropriate, not least the old hostname.

i have no idea what Evolution Backup does, but it sounds like it does more than just backup your evolution config files and mailboxes. you might have been better off just backing up your /home and /etc directories with tar (or perhaps rsyncing direct from the old laptop to the new - but ***DO NOT*** rsync /etc on the old machine to /etc on the new machine...instead, rsync it it to new-machine:/backup/old-machine-name/etc and use the config files in there as guides for manually configuring your new machine. some config files you can copy in directly, but most it will be safer to examine and re-implement the new config) if you were migrating from debian on the old laptop to debian on the new laptop, i'd say it would be less hassle to copy all or most of the old /etc to the new /etc and just change the few things that need changing (like /etc/hostname)....or even better, just rsync the old machine to the new machine and run an apt-get dist-upgrade on it. but you are migrating from ubuntu to debian so it's better to start with a fresh /etc and manually reconfigure the things you need. in fact, if you still have the old laptop to work with and you haven't got too much new/changed stuff on the new laptop that you need to keep, i'd recommend erasing and re-installing the new latop and backing up /etc/ and /home as mentioned above. if the username(s) match on both laptops you can restore the /home tarfile or rsync it direct to /home on the new laptop. otherwise restore to /backup/old-machine-name/home, use 'chown -R', and 'chgrp -R' to fix ownership and group as required, and then move or copy them into place under /home. An important note on app configs under /home: you may still find that your old application configurations under /home are not noticed by the newer versions of the gnome applications (and others) as the configuration format and method changes rapidly in bizarre and only semi-documented ways for some applications...gnome seems to be one of the worst offenders in this regard (over the years as you upgrade you will discover that you have somehow acquired numerous different configuration files for the same application and no easy way to tell which is current or valid and if/how the various configs interact). OTOH some apps still use a more traditional dot-file config and remain compatible across many different versions. for this reason you may be better off just copying your data directories from the old to the new home and starting with a clean-slate as far as app config goes. For most apps you will probably get best results with the new default configs. for a handful, like your mail client, you will want to manually configure it to match (or approximate) the old configuration. For mozilla apps, you can probably just copy ~/.mozilla from the old machine to the new (this will keep your prefs, cookies, any stored passwords incl master pasword etc) if you use GPG then remember to copy your ~/.gnupg directory so that you don't lose your encryption key. you probably want to do the same for ~/.ssh

You might wish to consider migrating away from Evolution; apparently it's due to be deprecated and replaced by the Gnome developers anyway, so unless someone takes it over it might be reaching the end of its development road.

if you want a graphical mail client, i'd suggest Icedove aka Thunderbird by the Mozilla team. I'm a mutt user mostly myself, but I used Icdove for several years at work (i switched back to mutt there last year because i changed jobs and was reading mail mostly over ssh sessions rather than directly from my desktop)....it works quite nicely and has a useful range of plugins available like iceweasel (my favourite is External Editor which allows me to use gvim to edit messages that require more than a quick & short reply).

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I would appreciate comments and suggestions from others who have made such a transition as that. I am expecting that the networking was also where the fault lies with updating Synaptic. I tried to use Google+, only to be told that the default Iceweasle was not recent enough. I could have taken the link on the webpage for Firefox, but I would prefer to have everything logged through apt/synaptic rather than trying to hand install and then maintain and keep up to date. That is a big part of why I have chosen Debian, and the administrative tools associated with Debian.

Your best option would be to run debian Testing, I suspect, which is moving closer by the day to a release. That will give you Firefox/Iceweasel 10, and you can get 19.0 from the experimental repository.

iceweasel 17.0.1-1 is in 'sid' aka 'unstable'. I found 19 to be buggy and unreliable when i tried i last year, and reverted back to 17. 'stable' is too old, now...and 'testing' will be released as 'wheezy' sometime this year. your best bet would be to install or upgrade to testing/wheezy now, and cherry-pick a few packages from sid. the easiest way to do this is by adding both wheezy and sid lines in /etc/apt/sources.list (or to separate files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, and then adding the line: APT::Default-Release "wheezy"; to either /etc/apt/apt.conf or to a low-sorting filename in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ (e.g. /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/0000default)) once that's done, apt-get will use wheeze for packages unless you tell it to use sid - for example, 'apt-get -t sid install iceweasel'. i use this method to default to sid and cherry-pick some packages from experimental. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>

Brian May <brian@microcomaustralia.com.au> wrote:

Why is Thunderbird any better then evolution?

I think Thunderbird is also dead.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/06/mozilla-giving-thunderbird-the-effective-...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/06/thunderbird_dead/

etc.

Are there any which aren't dead or dying? Mutt isn't dying, as far as I know; Notmuch is the new MUA that a number of smart people are already using, but I haven't made the necessary effort to migrate. Alpine lost its University of Washington sponsor and doesn't seem to have seen much maintenance since then.

Erik Christiansen <dvalin@internode.on.net> wrote:

I've used it for about 15 years now, satisfying all my mail needs with fetchmail, procmail, and mutt. (Moved from sendmail to postfix, for sending, some years ago.)

Me too, but I'm a more recent convert to Mutt (I had used Elm and Pine originally, followed by Emacs mailers). Relevant to the broader topic of this thread is the following post on LWN: http://lwn.net/Articles/545221/ I can't comment on the merits of the MUA however, other than to note that Geary is packaged in Debian.

Andrew McGlashan writes:

[Re tbird] I would much prefer Maildir storage on my local machine and not just on the server, instead I have mbox storage locally which can be painful with large mail boxes (folders with heaps of emails).

You don't just run a local dovecot, maybe with offlineimap? That's what gnus users had to do for years, because nnmaildir was unusably slow (and nnimap wasn't).

Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> writes:

Your best option would be to run debian Testing, I suspect, which is moving closer by the day to a release. That will give you Firefox/Iceweasel 10, and you can get 19.0 from the experimental repository.

+1 -- wait for debian 7 (or install it now), we're in the home stretch. http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical When those 55 RC bugs are closed, wheezy will be released.