So, did you get any exercise today, Bear?

[mdlbear]

Didn't manage to walk today -- one of my coworkers came into my office just before lunch with an interesting (in the Chinese curse sense) upgrade problem, and we spent the rest of the day working on it. But I have been good about parking at the far end of the parking lot, and eating mostly dried fruit for lunch.

The problem was, in fact, pretty interesting: we have a pair of Linux tablet computers that we bought a couple of years ago. They came from Element Computing, which is no longer in business, and shipped with a customized version of Xandros on them which is now hopelessly out of date.

So the challenge is to upgrade them to something useful. Like Debian Etch. Mine had already had a copy of Testing installed in another partition, back when Testing was Sarge. Like a fool, I just chroot'ed in, did a dist-upgrade and waited for the smoke. Having played this game before I had sense enough to install a new kernel as well. Amazingly enough, it mostly worked. I had to drop back into the vesa display driver -- via didn't recognize the chipset correctly. And I still don't have the touchscreen working -- it's apparently a Fujitsu, but there are some oddities about the serial connection that I haven't figured out yet.

Kim wasn't so lucky -- he'd left his install pretty much alone, so he only had one partition. We tar'ed off the entire thing (about 3GB) for backup, and set about seeing whether one could dist-upgrade a Xandros system to Etch. Apparently not. So we tried to go back.

That was a mistake, because after tar'ing the original contents back we neglected to reinstall lilo. Too used to having things easy with grub, I guess. So when we tried to reboot, lilo emitted a couple of lines of gibberish and then hung. So tomorrow I bring in a USB CDROM drive -- the stupid tablet doesn't have a built-in drive. Makes it a lot lighter, but it's hell when you're trying to do an upgrade.

(Originally intended for healthy_fen; edited so it makes sense in my LJ.)