sawbona, Greg, et al,

So Greg, yeah 'duh' on building from source. Years ago, that's what I'd
default to (been at this decades),
but modern distributions get fussy about playing outside the rules (a bit),
so I'm trying to color between the
lines. I did look up all the dependencies for building ufraw-batch (more
uncertain work than willing to pursue),
and also tried the manual install of the .deb files I already had on the
older machine on another test VM,
and that failed, so knowing that my older machine worked, and I found all
the packages needed in Beowulf, I made
up a new VM and started with Beowulf. I installed what I typically install
and made sure the picture thing
worked (display of .rw2). Upgraded to chimaera, and the picture thing
broke, but that turned out to be something
I'd already debugged on the old machine (a bug in
/etc/ImageMagick-6/delegates.xml). Ran into minor issues with
the upgrade processes and ended up installing aptitude, so I could run
aptitude safe-upgrade, and that cleaned up
a bunch of issues. After a few go-rounds of update/upgrade/aptitude
safe-upgrade, I have an working daedalus
VM that I can still edit .rw2 images.

Maybe not the most efficient, but goal accomplished while playing nice.

Thx, Chris

PS: here's the fix for the delegates.xml:
This is broken:
<delegate decode="dng:decode" command="&quot;ufraw-batch&quot; --silent
--create-id=also --out-type=png --out-depth=16 --output=&quot;%u.png&quot;
&quot;%i&quot;"/>
This fixes the issue:
<delegate decode="dng:decode" command="&quot;ufraw-batch&quot; --silent
--create-id=also --out-type=png --out-depth=16 &quot;--output=%u.png&quot;
&quot;%i&quot;"/>

It's an issue with how the bits of the command line are quoted.  Here's what
the error looks like:
crichmon@photos:~$ display 2023\:12\:20_P1020435.RW2
** Message: 18:46:01.581: Error in canonicalize_file_name('/tmp): No such
file or directory
display-im6.q16: delegate failed `'ufraw-batch' --silent --create-id=also
--out-type=png --out-depth=16 --output='%u.png' '%i'' @ error/  
display-im6.q16: unable to open image `/tmp/magick-20961Mxui5DxKcmFk.ppm':
No such file or directory @ error/blob.c/OpenBlob/2874.