Hi,

I upgraded my main box to daedalus last night. Main reasons why I
waited so long before doing it were: chimaera seemed to be a "vintage"
release - really stable; also, 37 years as a sysadmin left me with a
phobia about upgrades (more weekends than I care to remember spent
trying to fix and/or back out failed upgrades).

The upgrade to daedalus took about 7 hours (so I got to bed at about
05:00 this morning, and thinking is proving a challenge at the moment).

One thing which I've dreaded from first using linux is the way that
desktop packagers don't seem to be able to resist the temptation to
fool about with the default fonts for every new release. I use xfce,
and evolution as my mail client, and at the moment, I can hardly read
what I'm typing, even though I've increased the default font size.) If
anyone else has encountered this and found a quick fix, I'd be grateful
to know. (I've already played around with the antialiasing stuff in
settings -> appearance, without any noticeable improvement. I suspect
that at least temporarily, I'm going to have to switch to a bold font.

One thing that's broken is slapd (the openLDAP server). I've found the
underlying reason: apparently bookworm moved to openLDAP 2.5, in which
the old bdb backend was removed. My own LDAP directory is in bdb
format. The 2.5 upgrade backs up the settings and directories to LDIF
files, and then tries to re-import them after the upgrade. However, if
there's a bdb format directory, the reload fails because slapd can't
find the bdb module and won't start. Presumably, there should be a
stage where the config files are changed to remove the requirement for
the bdb module, but this has been missed. Again - if anyone's hit this
and found a fix, I'd be really grateful to hear about it. (It's not a
big deal, as the actual directory isn't really needed any more. I think
I can probably fix it by playing around with it manually - it'll just
take time: if I do manage to fix it, I'll report back.)