upgrading to debian testing

in the past ive always used debian stable, but this time around i decided to try testing, so i could always keep a more up to date system. i'm having trouble getting some of my usual programs to work. im not sure if its because what im looking for has been removed, deprecated or what. i was trying to install xmms through apt but that didnt work, downloading the source and trying to build it also didnt help as i got missing glibc errors. i finally got past them and now im getting missing gtk+ errors. is there an easier way to install xmms or how can i install gtk+ because i cant seem to find it in apt. i downloaded the gtk+ source but that errors out as well when i try to build. also, wine seems to not be in the apt repository either.. has it been removed? has anyone else come across similar problems?

Why not give XMMS2 a try. You can install with apt-get.

About XMMS2

Good Luck,

As teeitup mentioned, XMMS is depreciated and XMMS2 is the replacement package ('apt-get install xmms2' will work for you). A couple things you can do if you are trying to find a program:

You can go here, pick your release (stable, testing, unstable), and look for your package.

The other route is 'apt-cache search x' where x is the package you want. If you get too many hits you can pipe it into grep 'apt-cache search x | grep y'

well i did eventually get xmms installed but it built without alsa support so then i started searching for other/similar apps and came across qmmp. it seems just like xmms. i guess i can look into xmms2, why was xmms deprecated?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jiggolo182

why was xmms deprecated?

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XMMS uses GTK1 libraries, XMMS2 was rewritten from scratch using GTK2. Assuming that is why you got gtk errors earlier, testing moved on to GTK2 and xmms source looks for GTK1. It's been awhile since I used xmms at all, but I don't remember missing anything from 2 to 1. Let me know if you see otherwise.

EDIT => Also I should note that at some point Audacious took over as the successor to xmms2 (both being audio only). If you want a video/audio/media combo, VLC works well. Don't think so by your GTK mentioning, but if you prefer KDE libraries I think Amarok is the main one.

so i also posted this in the kernel forum but im not sure anyone reads that.. maybe you could help?

I have recently installed the 32-bit version of debian testing on my machine. I have a 64-bit processor and 6Gb of RAM but my system only sees up to 4Gb. A few years ago i had installed the 64-bit version of stable, and ended up switching back to 32-bit because it seemed like many programs didnt want to work correctly and i needed 64-bit and 32-bit libraries installed for certain programs. At least thats what i remember, but it has been a while. So im trying to rebuild a 3.1 kernel and using menuconfig to up the allowable memory but the only choice it gives me is 4G. Should i go ahead and reinstall the debian 64-bit version? is there any way to allow a 32-bit system to see more than 4G? My old system, which was 32-bit had a rebuilt kernel which saw all 6.

4GB cap comes from the memory allocation being tied to a 32-bit register (2^32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes). Take note that this is all memory (video card, ram, etc).

If you want to keep 32-bit, you can get the PAE (Physical Address Extension) version of the kernel. This extends the register to be capable of 64GB of memory mapping.

When 64-bit first came to Linux it was buggy and not worth it. Now-a-days I have it on both my server and desktop and don't have any issues. Most of the common programs have 64-bit binaries, and the ones that don't can be run with the 32-bit libraries.

I would assume that if you have a single program actually in need of that much memory it would be better to go 64-bit. If you just want it all available for multitasking, then either will be fine.

that's good info! i guess i will try the pae version and see how that works. do you think its worth ditching the 32-bit for the 64-bit? is there a major performance difference? im running gkrellm and cpu constantly bounces around between 40% and 80%. i wonder if 64 handles that better?

There is a great read here that goes over many of the myths and facts.

My opinion:

In general, average desktop usage does not have a need for 64-bit as of yet. However, as long as their is either a legacy mode support (32-bit) or a 64-bit build available for all the programs you need, there isn't anything wrong with making the move now. You will have to make the move by 2038 as the counter will run out of room.

Where 64-bit shines is in number crunching as many of the register spaces were doubled (SSE floating point comes to mind). This greatly helps scientific oriented pc's. For a desktop, you might see a slight increase in the ability to encode, encrypt (if you were cpu heavy and not HD I/O capped), compress, etc.

Everything I have is 64-bit. I go with it and never think of it. The only trouble I remember having recently was with a 32-bit proprietary printer driver (I avoid Canon printers now).