Upgrade to Debian Wheezy

The current oldstable Debian version is called Wheezy. The Debian version is 7.x with x == 9 as of September 2015. If you are coming directly from Lenny please also take a look at the SqueezeUpgrade notes.

lxi's

Central interactive Wheezy nodes are available as lxwheezy64.gsi.de.

LibreOffice supercedes OpenOffice

Debian Wheezy ships LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. Therefore the programs are prefixes with lo, eg. lowriter, localc … on the commandline.

Disappearance/Emptiness of /usr/local

The software installation on the central /usr/local NFS server has grown rather chaotic in more than a decade without thorough cleanup, outdated and partly unmaintained. Therefore we decided to make a radical cut and not do mount the old /usr/local any more.

We provide CVMFS-based software supply mechanisms for Wheezy instead, as is already in place on the Prometheus Cluster (BatchFarm) on Squeeze. Please have a look in /cvmfs/it.gsi.de/.

Acrobat Reader has left the building

Adobe does not provide up to date versions of Acrobat Reader (X and XI) for Linux but stopped the Linux support with Acrobat Reader 9. The support for Acrobat Reader 9 ended in July 2013 (see article in heise.de (German)). Therefore we cannot provide Acrobat Reader on Linux anymore.

Please use Iceweasels built-in PDF viewer, okular or xpdf instead. okular e.g. also allows filling out PDF forms and printing those documents. Unfortunately the Wheezy version of okular does not yet allow saving annotations directly into PDF documents.

Cernlib

We provide the Cernlib packages shipped by Debian. Please take a look at /usr/share/doc/cernlib/README.Debian.gz for instructions how to set up $CERN etc. and /usr/share/doc/cernlib/README.64bit for issues linking cernlib stuff on Intel/AMD 64bit systems.

Troubleshooting

X-sessions don't start

What happens

If you login on the display manager and your X-session starts, but then you are sent back to the login screen.

Reason

Most probably on of your shell profile files (~/.bashrc, ~/.profile, ~/.kshrc etc.) fails with an error eg. due to inclusion of a script from /usr/local that does not exist anymore.

Solution

Login on a text console (by pressing Ctrl - Alt - F1 or via SSH login)
Login (error messages on login may give you a hint on the source of the problem)
Fix errors or move away the profile script eg. mv ~/.profile ~/profile.backup
Return to the display manager (press Ctrl - Alt - F7) and login.

-- Christo - 2011 - 2016