Place of Stuff

I decided to play with Debian again, can’t recall why – it just seemed like a good idea at the time. So I grabbed my netinstall CD and installed Debian Etch (or Debian version 4.0). As expected, it installed without a hitch and all hardware except my PCMCIA wireless adapter was found and set up. The whole system worked fine.

At this point, it is important to note that apt (and aptitude) worked fine and had no issues installing software for me. So I opened my sources.list file and changed all instances of “etch” to “lenny” (If you need an explanation of the naming conventions go here) and ran apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade and then apt-get -f dist-upgrade and I get the following:

apt-get -y -f dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded

So, I’m a bit stuck. I’ve tried adding and removing different repositories and I even tried jumping straight to Debian Sid. I tried replacing testing with lenny to see if that was it, I’ve searched and I can’t work out what’s wrong with the @”£!&%@ thing. In case I was being an idiot, and that is very possible, I checked the version number:

cat /etc/debian_version
4.0
But nope, it didn’t upgrade and not tell me.
Frankly, I’m a wee bit unhappy – using apt is one of the great things about Debian (apart from the stability and available packages) and I was looking forward to using it. As much as I like installing from source (and I do) I liked the idea of a light, lean system with a decent package manager. Debian is, after all, almost as old as Slackware and easily as revered.

If I can’t fix this I’m going back to Slackware. Currently, I am unable to install anything with apt and I can’t figure out why. At least with Slackware i knew what I was doing.

As those who know me will know, I tend to change distros a lot. One of the problems I have encountered with this is that you lose your internet browser bookmarks and tend to forget your passwords and this rapidly becomes a pain. One of the solutions to this is to use the Google Browser Sync Firefox addon.

The program itself (if we assume, as I did, that it works flawlessly) is a godsend. It saves your bookmark list to a Google server along with your passwords, your cookies and the tabs/windows you last looked at. It’s also configurable, in a very limited sense, so you don’t have to save everything. As I said, it’s useful if you reinstall a lot but even more so if you wish to keep things sync’d across multiple PCs. And, because it’s Google, you feel all safe and helped.

But. A couple of months ago I reinstalled a distro and reinstalled the addon and discovered that all my bookmarks had gone. My passwords appeared to have been saved and worked, but all my carefully gathered bookmarks had disappeared. It wasn’t a total loss – I’m a bit of a hoarder and tend to save things even after they cease to be useful, so it was a good time to clear out my bookmarks and start again. But it was perturbing and so I hit the search trail – Google, not unsurprisingly.

I discovered that I am not alone. On a Google discussion group, there is a thread called “Wrath of GBS” which is now legendary. There are some workarounds discussed but none of them worked for me. Which seems par for the course. Michael Parekh seems to have pretty much the same experience. Well, he seems to have been affected more than me. By the way, I am, of course, aware that Firefox provides a backup version of your bookmarks – but if you reinstall your entire OS, that isn’t any help.

It seems that Google have ceased work on the addon, beyond a few people looking at it as part of the famous “20% work” at Google. (see here and here for a wee bit more detail) If true, this is a huge shame – this would not have been so attractive to me without the Google name.

So, having lost everything again today, I am looking into alternatives. Foxmarks is certainly an option, but what I want is a unified bookmark and password synchroniser. I am, though, resigned to using two projects for this.

So, if you want to recommend Google Browser Sync, go ahead. But expect me to be right next to you shaking my head