Hey everyone;

I am under a bit of a time crunch (or just lazy - you decide). I have a Debian Etch distro installed and I want to update it to Debian Lenny for some testing/development. I would like to use apt-get to do so if I can.

Can someone PLEASE point me in the right direction?

Any help would be very much appreciated!

G

The basic procedure is very easy. Simply change your apt sources list to the lenny sources and then run apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade.

Be careful though, dist-upgrade will likely want to uninstall a lot of packages along with the upgrades and new installs. Make sure you watch what it's doing very carefully. You might have to let it uninstall stuff, then reinstall them manually later. It's not a trivial operation, as the upgrade may affect hundreds of packages.

If you are under time pressure, you should not try to perform a dist-upgrade to testing.

Debian is great and so is the apt mechanism and eventually you'll have a fabulous and stable system. But upgrading from stable to testing 10 months after the last release of stable is at least daring if you really need your computer.

If you insist, take your precautions so you have a fall-back machine. The is *no* reversing procedure. (Oh I am sure people kick in and flame me...yes there is a reversal procedure but it is an order of magnitude more troublesome than the upgrade and that one already gave problems if you got to do the reversal, right?)

As David pointed out, apt-get dist-upgrade is the correct way. If you have a GUI installed, expect between 500-700 MB worth of download.

jlinkels

Well, there *is* a reversing procedure from dist-upgrade (not trying to flame you about it ) and here is a howto.

I know for a fact that it is *possible* as I've done it myself (though I will of course not be held legally responsible should your computer start shooting rays of lightning or explode, turn into a hungry T-rex and devour you, summon the Lord of Darkness and engulf the world in eternal suffering or otherwise behave in an unexpected and/or undesired way when you follow the howto ).

This was exactly what I tried to warn for

I remember one day when I had to work on a project (haha) and could not get a correct graphics driver for my version of Debian (Sarge at the time). I upgraded to testing which was Etch at the time. (Hahaha) No I didn't read the apt-upgrade-bugs or whatever that was called. (Hahahaha) To make a long story short, it took 1 1/2 weeks before I had a workable machine again and 3 weeks in total until I was running Etch but otherwise at the same point as before the upgrade. And the new graphic driver didn't solve the problem I had in the first place. (Hahahahahaha)


jlinkels