I am thinking of upgrading from slink to potato, but my disk space is very limited. Linux is installed on a 200 MB drive which currently has only 15 MB free. Quite a few of my programs and files are on my DOS/WIN disk with symlinks to them. I have created a directory tree on these disks with a symlink from /var/cache/apt to give me enough room for the download of potato. After setting my sources.list to point to unstable and doing apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade I get the following message: --------------------------------------------------- Reading Package Lists... Building Dependency Tree... The following packages will be REMOVED: timezones perl libstdc++2.9-dev newt0.25 netstd perl-tk mysql-base The following NEW packages will be installed: libpam0g libpopt0 bzip2 traceroute mysql-client perl-5.004-base libpam-modules perl-5.004 perl-5.005 ruptime libpam-runtime libdbi-perl rusers lockfile-progs rsh-server vflib2 libmysqlclient6 rdate cfingerd perl-5.004-doc tftp finger libstdc++2.10 icmpinfo libstdc++2.9-glibc2.1 rwho bootpc rdist ftp rwall midentd perl-5.005-base rwhod fping libbz2 rsh-client libstdc++2.10-dev libnewt0 liblockfile1 The following packages have been kept back procps xbase-clients smail netbase kbd 123 packages upgraded, 39 newly installed, 7 to remove and 5 not upgraded. Need to get 43.1MB of archives. After unpacking 25.0MB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] --------------------------------------------------- Now, I have about 55 MB available on the disk that the symlink is pointing to, so the 43.1 MB of archives to download is not a problem.
My first question concerns the 25.0 MB that will be used after unpacking. Does this mean that I need an additional 25 MB in /var/cache/apt/archives over and above the 43.1 MB of download? Do I need this space on my linux disk (spread out over wherever all of the updated and new packages reside? Or do I need this space somewhere else, or not at all? I don't want to start this upgrade if it can not go to completion, since a partially upgraded system is likely to be completely unusable. My second set of questions concerns some of the packages being removed and new packages being installed. I note that perl and perl-tk are being removed, while perl-5.004-base, perl-5.005-base, perl-5.004, perl-5.005, perl-5.004-doc, and libdbi-perl are added. Do the base perl files now include perl-tk, or will I lose that package's functionality with the upgrade? I am not currently using it, but had hoped to dabble with it sometime soon. Also, do I need both perl-5.004 and perl-5.005 and why are there docs for 5.004, but not for 5.005? Can anyone shed some like on this for me? Marc Shapiro http://www.bigfoot.com/~m_shapiro/ -- Linux IS user-friendly. It is just picky about who its friends are.
