In recent messaging here I touched on how I'd determined that my workstation was way behind being current. Apparently I needed to go 8->9->10->11. I tried the first of those steps, and things did not go well in a number of ways...
For some reason, the software decided to remove virtualbox. Which is a real problem, because it's inside a virtual machine that I do all of my mail, so I couldn't get at my mail for a while. In Synaptic Package Manager if I try to install it I get the following error message: "Package virtualbox has no available version, but exists in the database. This typically means that the package was mentioned in a dependency and never uploaded, has been obsoleted or is not available with the contents of sources.list" I got temporarily past this by installing 8 on this laptop I'm currently typimg on. Some things are decidedly less convenient. Firefox is majorly different, apparently having gone from 68.9.0 --> 78.14.0esr. It no longer uses the font that I'm telling it to, and for some odd reason won't play any youtube videos any more. Instead I see a message on the screen that says "if video doesn't start momentarily restart your device". Huh? Konqueror is also broken, I get "Could not start proess Unable to create io-slave: klauncher said: Error loading 'kio_file'"... Trying to open a file with Okular gets me a similar message. I don't see any way to back out of these changes, or any obvious place to look for where the problems are. Suggestions welcomed. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin
