Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote: > Lots of differences! systemd instead of init, grub instead of LILO, and > probably many more than I'd want to list here.
As it turns out, these are just the defaults. > I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to upgrades. Mostly > it's been a matter of running synaptic package manager from time > to time, and that's about it. Except that lately it doesn't seem > to be finding much of anything to do. Reading some of the stuff > in here, I suspect that I'm horribly out of date. Executing "cat > /etc/debian-version" returns 8.11! And there's now apparently a > version 11 out now?! I have followed the advice of some of the posts > in this list and consulted the release notes about how one might go > about upgrading, and from the latest on back each one says something > to the effect of only being able to upgrade from the last major > version, so if there's a good way to do this whole thing at once I'd > sure like to hear about it. No -- you must go 8 to 9, reboot; 9 to 10; reboot; 10 to 11; reboot. Normally that would have taken five or six years, though. > I sometimes want to log in as root. (Please don't waste your time and > mine by responding about how it's not a good idea to run as root...) > Very early versions of debian would list root, as well as created > users, on the login screen. This one doesn't, I have to click on "not > listed?" and then type in root and the root password. That works on > this install, but I also have a laptop with version 10 on it (sorry, > but the codenames are just not something that I find easy to deal > with) and in that case this procedure doesn't work. At all. The only > thing that works there is to log in as a regular user, and then use > the su command to get there. A bit of a pain. Where in the software > is this controlled? I really would like to change this behavior, if > at all possible. If the system will not let you login as root at a non-graphical console, it means that root does not have a password set. Login as a normal user, use su or sudo to change root's password, and then you should be able to login as root. If the system will not let you login as root from the graphical display manager, it's the GDM's fault. It may be a configurable option in its /etc/whateverdm. If not, you can always replace a recalcitrant GDM with original xdm, which doesn't care so much. -dsr-
