Debian :: Upgrade Stable to Wheezy

I've been running Debian Stable on my laptop and desktop at home for a couple of months now.  Even though I thought I could live with fairly out of date software in the repositories, I decided last night that I couldn't.  So I set out to upgrade to Wheezy (Testing). 

I simply changed every mention of "stable" to "testing" in my /etc/apt/sources.list.  Then I ran sudo aptitude update and sudo aptitude dist-upgrade.  The second command would exit every once in a while, so I'd have to run it again.  I just accepted whatever it told me it needed to do.  I kept running it until it finally didn't show any packages that needed to be upgraded.  At first, I had tried using sudo apt-get dist-upgrad, but after a while I couldn't get it to run anymore -- it kept showing unresolvable dependency errors.  Aptitude worked fine, though.  After it was done, I crossed my fingers and rebooted. 

On the desktop, after the reboot, I was greeted with a text login instead of with gdm3.  I ran sudo apt-get install gdm3 gnome-core.  Rebooted again, and still no graphical login.

I thought the issue might have been related to my NVIDIA drivers (I have a GTS 250 video card), so I uninstalled all the nvidia driver stuff that I had installed.  After that I tried installing the binary driver from NVIDIA's website.  It just SIGTERM-ed after accepting the license agreement. 

I re-installed all the nvidia dkms stuff and then deleted any xorg.conf that I had in /etc/X11.  Then I created a directory called /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d and (as root -- not with sudo) ran the command echo -e 'Section "Device"\n\tIdentifier "My GPU"\n\tDriver "nvidia"\nEndSection' > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf.

This time after restarting, I got my gdm3 login screen that I was hoping for.  I logged in and everything seemed to be in order.  I brought up the dash and decided to type in the name of some software to search for.  As soon as I hit a key, the dash would crash.  This happened every time I tried to type something into the dash's search box.  I was able to fix that by clearing the contents of a file and then making the file immutable with the chattr command:  echo > ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel && sudo chattr +i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel.

None of my NFS mounts were mounting as specified in /etc/fstab, and I discovered I needed to install nfs-common again using apt-get.  I also installed gnome-tweak-tool so I could have some more control over the Gnome environment.  One of the big things I used the tweak tool for was adding minimize and maximize buttons to windows.

Now the only problem I have is that the Software Center doesn't open for me.  Well, the window opens and it looks like it's trying to do something for a minute, but then just leaves me with a blank window.  I'm not too terribly concerned about it because I can still use aptitude, apt-get, and synaptic to install software.  It would be nice if it still worked, but I'm betting it will be fixed in a future update.  Either that or I'll end up fixing it myself or just re-installing at some point.