One of the machines here (actually my wife's) had Debian Sarge installed. It was a really messy system, with a Sarge installation from the time Sarge was testing. Then a number of programs installed during the time that Sarge was stable from the testing and even unstable branches.

So it was a pretty much mixed up machine, and many things were either very much outdated (Opera 7.x, kernel 2.6.8, KDE 3.3) or just not quite right.

I installed a new machine for her, and planned to re-install this one to get it back in a defined state. Since I planned to do that anyway, I had nothing to loose and tried to do a dist-upgrade to Lenny.

First I compiled and installed a 2.6.18 kernel, then I did the dist-upgrade.

...it al worked!

I did not even delete the old config and .rc files for KDE. The machine is loaded with applications like OpenOffice, Gaim, Mplayer, Quanta, QCAD, KMail, Acroread... It just all worked fine. Downlaoding and installing Opera 9.2 was a breeze and it works including Flash. Actually the machine worked better than before, and since I have a single dist branch again I feel more comfortable when I have to upgrade or install new programs.

Now with a mixed system like this, I do not recommend it. (Never try this at home!) But I am surprised by the great work the Debian maintainers and other programmers have performed to make this possible.

jlinkels

Doing that kernel upgrade first was the key. The Etch release notes make that very clear, and most of the problems people have upgrading from Sarge are related to failing to do that step.

Congratulations on running Lenny, the showcase of the Debian arena.