I did a “dist-upgrade” on my kFreeBSD debian / gnu test machine today, and upon restart, X11 failed to start. 
I realize that this debian port is incredibly volatile and experimental, so I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, just reporting my experience. I’m confident that in good time the problem will be fixed. I had just gotten iceweasel to work on it, so I’m looking forward to getting back to that stage.
Ran out of disk space in /var/… canceled dist-upgrade, resulting with:
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...
dpkg: error processing base-files (--configure):
package base-files is not ready for configuration
cannot configure (current status `triggers-awaited')
Errors were encountered while processing:
base-files
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Ouch!
So what to do… looking in /var/lib/apt/status:
Package: base-files
Essential: yes
Status: install ok triggers-awaited
Priority: required
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 432
Maintainer: Santiago Vila
Architecture: amd64
Version: 4.0.5
Replaces: base, miscutils
Provides: base
Depends: base-passwd (>= 2.0.3.4)
Pre-Depends: awk
Conffiles:
/etc/debian_version c3a1f14e3cfb4e2a815ff14692258219
/etc/host.conf 4eb63731c9f5e30903ac4fc07a7fe3d6
/etc/issue c5b47f7de972ac3f083cc6349bcb23db
/etc/issue.net ad006ab49199770f760dac332209cb27
Description: Debian base system miscellaneous files
This package contains the basic filesystem hierarchy of a Debian system, and
several important miscellaneous files, such as /etc/debian_version,
/etc/host.conf, /etc/issue, /etc/motd, /etc/profile, /etc/nsswitch.conf,
and others, and the text of several common licenses in use on Debian systems.
Triggers-Awaited: man-db
Going to re-install man-db:
dpkg -P man-db
apt-get install man-db
apt-get dist-upgrade
Yes! It worked! 
Debian’s lenny repositories are now featuring linux 2.6.26 - nice! I updated my Acer Extensa EX5620-4025 last night, but I’m still having some issues with hal and wifi.
The mini-pci-express chip is causing kernel oops, and I have no idea how to deal with that, other than submitting the error report.
Besides these issues, I’ve been leaning a ton about pfSense, ALIX boards, and hal in general. Good stuff indeed.
I’ve been working on my portable VPN gateway, and I have to admin its been a tough nut to crack. Not only did something get screwed up with my compact flash card, but I managed to totally disable two compact flash cards. I didn’t have a compact flash card, so what was I to do?
Thankfully, the new ALIX boards can PXE boot. I did this using debian, and then downloaded the pfSense image and flashed it to the compact flash card. So far so good!
My raw notes:
Having a heck of a time with my portable wifi VPN firewall setup. Not sure if
this type of thing is possible, if not, that's too bad.
Infrastructure - a connection to the internet - a client to other wireless provider
Ad-Hoc - a mesh node
Access point - a "Server" for wireless clients
=== Upgrading Embedded ===
Had to upload file via command page, then used /tmp/filename to upgrade via
the terminal.
console=ttyS0,38400n8
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/478
http://cmrg.fifthhorseman.net/wiki/embedded/alix
http://linux-sxs.org/internet_serving/pxeboot.html
http://www.sigsegv.cx/diskless-2.html