Table of Contents
Sometimes, changes have side-effects we cannot reasonably avoid, or we expose bugs somewhere else. We document here the issues we are aware of. Please also read the errata, the relevant packages' documentation, bug reports and other information mentioned in Section 6.1, “Further reading”.
Although udev has been tested
extensively, you may experience minor problems with some devices that will need
to be fixed. The most common problems are changed permission and/or ownership
of a device. In some cases a device may not be created by default (e.g.
/dev/video and /dev/radio).
udev provides configuration mechanisms
to deal with these issues. See udev(8)
and /etc/udev for further information.
Some applications in lenny may no longer work with a 2.4 kernel, for example
because they require epoll() support, which is not available
in 2.4 kernels. Such applications may either not work at all or not work
correctly until the system has been rebooted with a 2.6 kernel.
Since 2.6.17, Linux aggressively uses TCP window scaling which is specified in RFC 1323. Some servers have a broken behavior, and announce wrong window sizes for themselves. For more details, please see the bug reports #381262, #395066, #401435.
There are usually two workarounds to these problems: either revert the maximum allowed TCP window sizes to a smaller value (preferable) or turn off TCP window scaling altogether (deprecated). See the example commands in the debian-installer errata page.
On some older systems, shutdown -h may not power off the
system anymore (but just stop it). This happens because
APM needs to be used
there. Adding acpi=off apm=power_off to the kernel's
command line, e.g. in grub or
lilo configuration files should fix
this issue. Please see bug #390547 for additional information.
On systems which use udev to load
drivers for network interfaces, it is possible due to the asynchronous nature
of udev that the network driver will
not be loaded before /etc/init.d/networking runs on system
boot. Although including allow-hotplug to
/etc/network/interfaces (in addition to
auto) will ensure that the network interface is enabled once
it becomes available, there is no guarantee that this will finish before the
boot sequence begins to start network services, some of which may not behave
correctly in the absence of the network interface.
In etch, the wpasupplicant package was
set up as a system service, configured via
/etc/default/wpasupplicant and a user-provided
/etc/wpasupplicant.conf.
In lenny, /etc/init.d/wpasupplicant has been dropped and
the Debian package now integrates with
/etc/network/interfaces, similar to other packages such as
wireless-tools. This means wpasupplicant no longer provides a system service
directly.
For information on configuring wpasupplicant please refer to
/usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.modes.gz, which gives
examples for /etc/network/interfaces files. Updated
information about the usage of the wpasupplicant package in Debian can be found in the
Debian Wiki.
Mounting vfat, ntfs or iso9660 file systems with files that include non-ASCII
characters in their filenames will give failures when one tries to use the
filenames unless mounting is done with the utf8 option. An indication might be
the following failure: “Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character”. A
possible solution is to use defaults,utf8 as mount options
for vfat, ntfs and iso9660 file systems when they contain filenames with
non-ASCII characters.
Note that the Linux kernel does not support case-insensitive filename handling
for vfat when the utf8 option is used.
In rare cases, sound might stop working after the upgrade. If this happens, go through the ALSA checklist:
run alsaconf as root user,
add your user to the audio group,
make sure the sound channel levels are up and unmuted (using alsamixer),
make sure arts and esound are not running,
make sure no OSS modules are loaded,
make sure the speakers are actually switched on, and
check whether the command
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio
or the command
speaker-test
works for root.
Since util-linux 2.13
NFS mounts are no longer handled by util-linux itself, but by nfs-common. Since not all systems
mount NFS shares and to avoid a standard
portmapper installation util-linux only suggests nfs-common. If you need to mount
NFS shares, make sure nfs-common is installed on your
system. The preinstallation script of the mount package checks whether
NFS mounts exist and aborts if
/usr/sbin/mount.nfs from nfs-common is not present or if
nfs-common is
out-of-date. Either upgrade nfs-common or unmount any
NFS mounts prior to upgrading mount.
Because of the upgrade to xkb-data version 1.3 in lenny
the default variant for Romanian (ro) layout is now producing the
correct șț characters (comma below) instead of şţ (cedilla
below). Also some of the variants have been renamed. The old
variant names still work, but users are encouraged to update their
/etc/X11/xorg.conf. More info as well as
possible side effects due to this change are available in the
wiki (Romanian language only).
The apache2 default configuration has changed in some ways that may require manual changes to your configuration. The most important changes are:
NameVirtualHost * has been changed to
NameVirtualHost *:80. If you have added more
name based virtual hosts, you need to change
<VirtualHost *> to
<VirtualHost *:80> for each of them.
The Apache User and Group and the PidFile path are now configured
in /etc/apache2/envvars. If you have changed
these settings from their default values, you need to change that
file. This also means that starting apache2 with apache2
-k start is no longer possible, you have to use
/etc/init.d/apache2 or
apache2ctl.
The suexec helper program needed for mod_suexec is now shipped in
a separate package, apache2-suexec, which is not installed
by default.
More module specific configuration has been moved from
/etc/apache2/apache2.conf to
/etc/apache2/mods-available/*.conf.
For more detailed information, see
/usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/NEWS.Debian.gz
and
/usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/README.Debian.gz.
The version of ypbind included with nis for lenny contains support for Network Manager.
This support causes ypbind to disable NIS client
functionality when Network Manager reports that the computer is disconnected
from the network. Since Network Manager will usually report that the computer
is disconnected when it is not in use, NIS users with NIS client systems should
ensure that Network Manager support is disabled on those systems.
This can be done by either uninstalling the network-manager package, or editing
/etc/default/nis to add -no-dbus to
YPBINDARGS.
The use of -no-dbus is the default for new installs of
Debian, but was not the default in previous releases.
The Mozilla programs firefox,
thunderbird, and
sunbird (rebranded in Debian to
iceweasel, icedove, and iceowl, respectively), are important tools for
many users. Unfortunately the upstream security policy is to urge users to
update to new upstream versions, which conflicts with Debian's policy of not
shipping large functional changes in security updates. We cannot predict it
today, but during the lifetime of lenny the Debian Security Team may come to a
point where supporting Mozilla products is no longer feasible and announce the
end of security support for Mozilla products. You should take this into
account when deploying Mozilla and consider alternatives available in Debian if
the absence of security support would pose a problem for you.
iceape, the unbranded version
of the seamonkey internet
suite has been removed from lenny (with the exception of a few
internal library packages).
The webservice packages ocsinventory-server and sql-ledger are included in the lenny
release but have special security requirements that users should be aware of
before deploying them. These two webservices are designed for deployment
only behind an authenticated HTTP zone and should never be made available to
untrusted users; and therefore they receive only limited security support
from the Debian security team. Users should therefore take particular care
when evaluating who to grant access to these services.
There are no huge changes in the KDE Desktop Enviroment from the version shipped in etch. Lenny ships an updated translation and service release of KDE 3.5 that is a mixture of 3.5.9 and 3.5.10. Some modules are labeled as version 3.5.9, but have been updated and include most of the same changes found in 3.5.10. Overall, lenny ships 3.5.10 without the kicker improvements shipped in kdebase and some bug fixes in kdepim.
Lenny will be the last stable release including a KDE 3 series environment.
There have been many changes in the GNOME desktop environment from the version shipped in etch to the version in lenny, you can find more information in the GNOME 2.22 Release Notes.
Emacs21 and emacs21-nox are not configured to use Unicode by default. For more
information and a workaround please see bug #419490.
Consider switching to emacs22,
emacs22-gtk, or emacs22-nox.
OpenLDAP has dropped support for LDAP replication via the slurpd service in release 2.4.7. Existing configurations need to be reconfigured for the LDAP Sync Replication engine (syncrepl). More verbose documentation can be found at http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin24/replication.html.
The driver for Intel Mobile GM965 may wrongly detect a
VGA output and set the size of the screen to a
lower value to accomodate it. The symptom of this bug is that the
desktop manager will only use a fraction of the screen. Correct
behaviour can be forced by adding the following lines to the
/etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration file.
Section "Monitor" Identifier "VGA" Option "Ignore" "true" EndSection
Please refer to the bug #496169 for more informations.
When running a failover pair of DHCP servers, the peer names need to be consistent, otherwise DHCP will crash.
Please see bug #513506 and https://lists.isc.org/pipermail/dhcp-users/2007-September/004538.html for more information.