2018-02-07-1640Z


since Sunday I've been fighting on two separate fronts: an oil change and a crossgrade of my Debian notebook to a full 64-bit system. finally started making progress today.

problems with the oil change: the filter had a different design of fluting, or whatever you call it, on the cap, and my old filter wrench didn't fit. I also noted it was missing a silicone seal ring, but figured it was designed that way for a reason, not noticing the box illustration making a point of how great the silicone ring was...

anyway, as you can probably guess, the damned thing leaked like a sieve, and got oil stains all over the carport floor. I not only had to deliver the bad news, but then I had to figure out a way to correct it. it took a few tries; the first universal filter wrench I bought was a bad design, and broke on the first turn of the ratchet handle. I took it back to AutoZone, and the employee and two managers took about a man-hour between them trying to fix it before offering me a new one. I said no, es una mierda, and finally they gave me my money back. I had stopped at the other AutoZone and bought 2 other universal wrenches, hoping one of them would work, plus I got another filter, one that did have the right fluting for my old filter wrench, and an intact seal ring.

so anyway, just a few minutes ago, I tried removing the bad filter with the two wrenches; the first was too small, and the 2nd, made with webbing, I couldn't get to work. but then I washed the outside of the filter to get the leaked oil off, and with a glove, was able to remove it. I was expecting a lot of oil to come out too, because this time I didn't drain it, but surprisingly there was only a trickle. I guess the filter is higher up in the engine block than I thought.

so anyway, the new filter is in, and tightened, and I'm going to let any drips land on the carboard I've got under the car before I back it out and start cleaning up the rest of the oil mess. after about 4 applications of degreaser, the first few feet of the stains is much improved.

now, about the Debian crossgrade. never attempt it on a multilib system that's got sid packages on it, or probably not even on any multilib system with a bunch of 64-bit packages already installed. everything broke, including apt and dpkg. and my kernel was removed. luckily I already had a working debootstrapped directory, /opt/wheezy64, I could chroot into and fix many of the problems. and I used its apt and dpkg binaries when mine were broken due to being out of sync with libraries. but still I had so many packages out of sync in the i386 and amd64 flavors that apt-get -f install couldn't find a fix for it. I found a lot of matching i386 packages under snapshot.debian.org/package/, but it's a tedious process and when you have so many layers of dependencies to navigate it just gets tedious and frustrating.

finally this morning I hit upon apt-get -f upgrade... why the fuck didn't I think of that before? it's got a lot more smarts, and figured out a solution. I still had to juggle things around, edit prerm and postinst scripts, and generally stay on top of it every step of the way, but after 10 to 20 tries, (I lost count) it finally succeeded. I now have a full 64-bit system. I'm not sure it will survive a reboot, hence this update; I may not be online for a few days if it fails.

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last updated 2018-02-07 12:03:36. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com