General Questions • [Software] Get w and who working in trixie?

Howdy,

The upgrade from Bookworm to Trixie broke the classic unix "who" and "w" commands -- who has no output at all and w does not list any users.
I understand why this happened: Debian is migrating away from classic utmp/wtmp because the file formats used a 32-bit integer which runs out of bits in 2038.

I found the replacements which work for wtmp and commands like "last."

I haven't been able to figure out how to get the who and w commands to work again.

Any suggestions? This is blocking my broader migration from Bookworm to Trixie.

Thanks,
Bill

Statistics: Posted by herrin — 2026-01-04 16:18

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