Verbosity 2.0 ~ Talking about life on Drupal

This collection of links originally appeared on my consulting website.  If you are a developer new to using Linux or Unix systems these guides will probably come in handy at some point.  Enjoy.

Todays post is a quick review of the upgrade process to get your existing Debian system up-to-date with version 5.  For those who are unfamiliar with Linux, Debian is a variation of the free computer operating system that is well suited for server usage.  It also happens to strip out most of the branding you would find in other Linux distributions which is one of the reasons I like it.

The Upgrade Process

Moving up to the new version of Debian was as simple as running the distribution update command:

apt-get install dist-upgrade

... except for the fact that my OS partition is now getting quite full.  So eventually it would stop, complain about disk space and ask me to resume later.  Apparently Lenny, the codename for Debian 5, requires more space.  Go figure.

apt-get clean

This Friday the 13th is a special one to your humble desktop computer.  Today the clock will strike 1234567890 seconds since the birth of time as we know it.

If you can think back as far as 1234567890 seconds ago you will possibly recall that computers were a big thing in 1970.  Big companies were starting to use them and programmers were getting tired of devising different ways of counting time and settled on one.  With that, the Unix Epoch began on January 1, 1970 and has been counting every second since.

Today I'm nearing the end of a full week off. It's been great sleeping in, snowboarding and working on some projects I've been putting off for a long time.

As you probably already know I have a web server I own that I maintain as a hobby. Recently a few friends who have accounts on the server started requesting new features and I figured it was probably time to bit the bullet and start the upgrades.