2013-11-02 Two days of system maintenance are done. I've spent time on the two Unix systems of relatives that I administrate. System no.1: A desktop machine with Debian oldstable, fluxbox and a small set of well chosen applications. I exchanged parts of the underlying hardware and did a fresh installation with the current Debian stable. Further more, I installed two hard disks, which I use as a RAID1. The installation went mostly fine, except for the RAID stuff in combination with lilo. I don't like grub, hence I use lilo as boot loader. But running lilo in the installation process result- ed in an error. It took me quite some time to discover the prob- lem source and then even more time to solve it. Actually it were two different problems. First, lilo only works with 0.9 raid me- tadata. [0] Second, I installed the system on a degraded RAID1 array. Lilo fails in that case. I solved this by running `lilo -H' manually. Furthermore, I adjusted the script /etc/initramfs/post-update.d/runlilo as explained in the bugreport. [1] Apart from that, I was very pleased to have some really relaxing time working on the system. Things went really smooth. This is how I'd like to have system maintenance work always. System no.2: A notebook with Debian old(-old?)-stable. The machine is only a fallback system; it's hardly used. As I was already installing a new system, I did this machine in the same go. This machine used to provide both, a Windows and a Debian system. The Unix system had a Gnome2 desktop. To avoid Gnome3, I chose Xfce this time (again without a login manager, as I've never un- derstood why one would want to have such thing). I'm not really satisfied with Xfce. In contrast to the neat fluxbox setup on the other system, Xfce appears to be quite complex. I wasn't able to enable the shutdown menu. Likely, this results from not having a login manager. Now, I added a direct shortcut to `sudo /sbin/halt'. I just don't like this complex modern ``get every- thing in one'' approach. I appreciate software that fits into the classic Unix approach. I might need to do some manual work then, but I know I can do it in the known straight forward way. As the user of this system needs a more diverse application set than the user of the other system, it's not so easy to simply configure fluxbox and cover all use cases. Btw: I always thought gedit(1) would be a small text editor, just what you install if you need a graphical editor. I was shocked to see that it needed 94 MB of packages to be installed. Come on! nearly 100 MB for just a text editor, are they kidding? [0] http://ailin.tucana.uberspace.de/nei/2006/10/softraid_lilo/ [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=728622 http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke