Quick Background: My wife's old laptop (bought it for her 2 years ago) was running vista and she finally got sick of it.

I installed Lenny onto it - had some issues getting the wifi working proper, so I formatted again and went with a fresh install of Squeeze.

To be honest, i'm a bit jealous now. I run Lenny on my desktop machine and have been loving it - It's been a great O.S and i'm proud of how she handles.

After seeing Squeeze in action though, i'm a bit envious - it looks so much cooler and the software availability - don't get me started lol.

How is the upgrade process these days? I mean, Can I safely changed my /etc/apt/sources.list file to point to squeeze packages and do an upgrade & update w/minimal issues?

Back in the days of Sarge/Stable & Sid/Testing or Unstable, I forget which, I upgraded w/no issues whatsoever. I guess i'm hoping for the same result here.

I have so much junk on this desktop machine (by junk, I mean pictures, family videos, etc) and I really don't have the means atm to back them all up, but my jaw dropped after playing w/squeeze and I want it. I mean, really... want... it.

Would I be better off just doing a complete wipe / re-formatting then doing a fresh install? Or is "upgrading" essentially the same only I can keep my old files?

I am not, and likely will never be a great linux guru of any sort but w/debian, I make my way just fine - i'm very comfortable w/it.

Any infos/help/relevant comments would be greatly appreciated.

Feel free to upgrade. The release notes aren't written yet, but you can read the Etch -> Lenny notes for an idea.

Basically, change your sources.list, apt-get update, upgrade apt & aptitude & dpkg, safe-upgrade then full-upgrade.

The only real issue is the new kernel and new udev.

Remove any APT source specific to stable (such as volatile), then s/lenny/squeeze/ on your sources.list and then
reboot;
As of <udev> 150 in squeeze, Linux kernel 2.6.27 or newer is required (i.e. upgrade kernel and udev at the same time). If udev installation fails and you already have a squeeze kernel installed, then reboot into the new kernel and "aptitude -f install ; aptitude safe-upgrade" to continue.

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Very cool I appreciate the replies!

I'll give this a shot after work tomorrow - i'll post an update of how it went!

Well, I'm now running squeeze!

The upgrade process didn't go as smooth as I had hoped. Luckily, I backed up most of my important files on my wifes laptop - Just put my files on her system over the network!

When I upgraded, it seemed that a few errors went down and after all was said and done, keeping a long story short, I ended up just reformatting and running a fresh install.

Of course, I ran into an issue with the network manager not handling eth0 out of the box so my wired connection was INOP for a few minutes until I edited /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf & changed 'managed=false' to managed='true'

Restared network manager and I was back in business.

It also seems that my Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse is running a bit sluggish. I opened the System Menu - System->Preferences->Mouse and adjusting the settings there so far hasn't helped. I'm looking further into the issue;

Aside from those two minor issues; "upgrading" to squeeze wasn't that horrible at all. Took a bit longer than I had hoped for, but so far it's a nice change.

[Edit]
It seems I may have a bad usb port - I tried rebooting several times w/no luck on the sluggish mouse getting faster, nothing I tried worked until I unplugged the mouse & moved it to a different usb port. It seems to be up to speed now and likely had nothing to do w/the install of squeeze.
[/Edit]

I've been using Debian for quiet a few years. Some of my upgrades have gone smoothly and some have not. But I've reach the point that a fresh install is the path I now take. Nothing wrong with the upgrade method, I just like a brand spanking new install. Makes me feel fuzzy all over. Sometimes I even get goose bumps.

I'm glad you like Squeeze. It's top notch. It feels to me that when it's released it'll be as up to date in it's apps as possible. Unlike Etch which was long in the tooth when it was officially released. At this point in Squeeze's development, I find it extremely stable. Perfect for the home desktop.

I have a confession to make. I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my laptop. It's been years since I tried an Ubuntu distro and I'm pleasantly surprised. Haven't hit a glitch as of yet. Just installed it a few weeks ago. I'm really liking it. Might put Debian back on it one of these days. But on my desktop, it's still Debian Squeeze. And it will always be Debian. Just can't let go of my favorite girl.

Sounds like you and I have had similar experiences regarding Debian upgrades. For the most part, my experiences have been positive although, recently, my upgrade didn't go smooth at all however, it's likely that I missed a step or two.

I too have been using Debian for years. I've been running it on my Desktop since Sarge v3.1. I wouldn't go as far as to call myself a Debian Fan-boy or anything like that, but I’m comfortable with Debian, i know the in's and the out's of how to run/maintain a Debian installation, which is why I choose to use it.

So far, I’m really enjoying Squeeze. It seems to be quite stable, I haven't had an issue yet (aside from the network manager not handling eth0 out of the box). I'm still very impressed w/the amount of upgraded software available in squeeze. I sincerely wish I had upgraded to squeeze a while back!!

You're running Ubuntu on your laptop eh? That's cool. From what I've read, Ubuntu is basically a fork of Debian Unstable - only the packages have been "fixed"? When I first installed Lenny onto my wife's laptop and couldn't get the wlan0 working after hours of research and testing, I was considering Ubuntu as an alternative, however - My wife is a windows gal and doesn't know word one about Linux. I prefer to be able to answer any questions she has w/o delay in hopes to get her to use it more often.

I have a couple of older HD's laying around (old 40 gigs lol) that I may install into my tower & perhaps test out Ubuntu on.

Like you though, I’ll always be running Debian on my desktop as a main OS, I don't believe I can find it in my heart to let her go.

Upgrading from Stable (Lenny) to Testing (Squeeze) won't always be painless. Once Squeeze becomes Stable, upgrading from Stable (Lenny) to Stable (Squeeze) is for 99% guaranteed without problems.

Don't forget that Squeeze is testing, hence the upgrade process will not be perfect.

Since Lenny is quite a few months old now, it has become outdated, and it is prudent to install Squeeze. Either as a fresh install, or as an upgrade with error solving afterwards. Recently I installed some new systems with Squeeze (for the older systems I do not do a re-install, matter of principles) and installation was rather smooth.

Having said this, on the system I am using now, I had a 9-months old Squeeze installation. I did a dist upgrade which pulled in over 900 packages and needed 2 GB+ of files to download. The upgrade went totally error free, including installation of a new kernel and the updating of Grub. The only thing I had to do manually was installing the new kernel headers, after which the modules for the NVIDIA driver and VirtualBox were recompiled automatically and ran at once.

jlinkels

I upgraded my Lenny install the other day just to see if it would break...
Here's what I did upgrading from Lenny-to-Squeeze-to-Sid

Background; this install was originally the 503box Chrome build
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Syste...86-53783.shtml

and I had added all kinds of stuff including k3b, etc so like over 1300 pkgs as of thursday
and this is what I did...

1) I uninstalled as many apps as possible leaving only things like fluxbox, iceweasel, pcmanfm, etc
and got it down to 900pkgs installed

2) I went here and made up 2 /etc/apt/sources.list files, one for squeeze, 1 for sid
http://debgen.simplylinux.ch/

so, first I deleted all the lenny sources and added the squeeze sources..

3) I rebooted, booted to console login; then did
apt-get update && aptitude safe-upgrade

4) after it successfully upgraded whatever I edited my grub conf for new kernel
and rebooted

5) again I booted to console, did
apt-get update && aptitude full-upgrade

still using the squeeze sources list
I then rebooted once it finished...

6) booted to X to made sure everything was working
updated the /etc/apt/sources.list by deleting squeeze repos and adding sid repos
did cntl-alt-f1 to go back to console and did

apt-get update && aptitude safe-upgrade

7) after it successfully upgraded whatever I edited my grub conf for new kernel
and rebooted and it was flawless execution!

8) then again did

apt-get update && aptitude full-upgrade

now running Sid!
and I made a Sid cd too
http://multidistro.com/NFLUXNEW/SQ4/debian.html

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The upgrade to Squeeze should be pretty pain-free for most people. However, in this perticular update, I personally am going with a fresh install. Most people are finding it best to install the new kernel in Squeeze before doing the safe then full-upgrade. However, your partitions will still be what ever they were. For most people, this means they will be ext3. While ext3 is a good filesystem there are a good many improvments in ext4 that in my opinion warrent a fresh format and install. Granted, one can update their filesystems to ext4 but doing so does not activate many of the new features one automatically has availibe if they start out with an ext4 filesystem. This is due to compatability issues migrating the old data into the new filesystem structure.

Boiling this down a bit, a fresh install of Ubuntu may actually out perform a Debian system that was just upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze. From my perspective, to acheive the best performance from Debian Squeeze one should do a fresh install and reformat their filesystems to ext4 (if they had been using ext3 previously). If you are using other filesystems (like reiser for example) there really hasn't been much change in them so if you intend to keep using them, there is not a real good reason to do a fresh install over an upgrade. Myself, I do use a few other filesystems on my main box. I think after reading the specs on ext4, I am not going to need the other filesystems any longer so reinstalling is looking pretty good to me at this point.

Hm, I was unaware of a filesystem update. The official Net Install disc's for lenny & squeeze do not offer ext4 as an option when writing changes to the disk.

Either way, i'll definitely look into it - however I think i'll stick w/my current set up for now.

When I did the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze, I pretty much followed this guide: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/..._Debian_branch

It didn't go as smoothly as one would have hoped, but in the end, a fresh net install worked out nicely.

On Lenny, some of my hardware wasn't supported or took entirely too much effort to get working. Such as my HP Photosmart C7280 network printer; wifi card on my wife’s laptop wasn't agreeable either. With Squeeze, the above mentioned worked w/o any extra set up, out of the box.

The process was a bit time consuming; but for anyone looking to get into debian or running lenny that wants to upgrade; squeeze is, in my opinion, an excellent choice.

Lenny doesn't offer it. You can still have the support though if you upgrade the kernel and modify Grub a bit. Squeeze's kernel and Grub2 both support the use of ext4 natively though. I haven't tried the Squeeze installer in some time and my memory is not so hot so I couldn't tell you what was there if my life depended on it. Also, I used the installer from Sid and used the the advanced install so even if I could remember, things might have been a little differnt.