Upgrade to Debian Squeeze

Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) is the next-to-current Debian release. As of 2014 PrometheusCluster and all native Lustre clients are running Debian Squeeze. Desktops should be upgraded to Debian Wheezy.

KDE 4

The probably biggest change in Squeeze is KDE Version 4 instead of KDE 3 before. This brings a lot of changes. We have tried our best to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Anyhow many parts of your KDE 3 settings will not be applicable any more or not properly converted and simply ignored. Some may also hinder the proper functioning of the KDE 4 version and have to be deleted.

We recommend at least 2 GB RAM for running KDE4. For older PCs with less RAM and no RAM extension possibilities we recommend using the alternative desktop environment XFCE that is also provided cf. TipsXFCE.

KDE PIM applications: Kontact / Kmail / Kaddressbook

The KDE PIM applications switched to a database-driven common backend called akonadi. In principle this is a good idea, but in pratice it does not suit into our cluster environment at all, especially if you have concurrent KDE logins on multiple machines.

Therefore we strongly discourage the use of Kmail/Kontact etc. on Squeeze or later in favor of the recommended and supported mail client icedove.

For further details see http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Which_DBMS_does_Akonadi_use.3F

Printing Environment

Convenient printing to the old LprNG printserver (ie. kprinter) is no longer available in KDE 4. Use the new CUPS server instead, cf. PrintingHowto .

dash vs. bash

The system /bin/sh is no longer linked to /bin/bash but to /bin/dash which is less heavyweight and promises faster shell invocations esp. on system bootup.

If your shell scripts make use of bash-specific shell (bashisms) code and do not have #!/bin/bash as their first line (aka. shebang) you will get syntax errors.

You can check for bashisms in your shell scripts with the checkbashisms utility.

-- Christo - 2011 - 2016