[SOLVED] Upgraded Wheezy with 'upgrade' not 'dist-upgrade'. How to resolve?

Higgsboson · 02-03-2016, 05:52 PM

I did not realise that to change from Wheezy to Jessie I needed to go through a special 'dist-upgrade' ritual. Instead, I used 'apt-get upgrade'. So when all the new Jessie packages came rolling in, I thought I had upgraded to Jessie.
Well, the debian background wallpaper had changed so it might as well be Jessie. That's what I thought.

After starting a thread why Iceweasel browser was never updating, Timothy Miller from this site advised I should've used 'dist-upgrade' instead of just 'upgrade'. So that is my problem. Timothy also offered this solution http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post5491880.
This is pretty fantastic as I'm a newbie and it sorts all my problems out.
However, there is a small problem, the solution may not work and I will lose the whole OS.
I'm wondering if other people have made the same mistake as me and know of a workable remedy from changing a Wheezy kernel with Jessie packages to a proper Jessie OS. Thanks to Timothy Miller for seeing my problem so quickly.

Higgsboson · 02-05-2016, 03:07 AM

The solution given by TM is as follows:

Code:

sed -i 's/stable/oldstable/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get autoclean
*reboot*
sed -i s/oldstable/stable/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get dist-upgrade
*reboot*
apt-get autoremove --purge

I have a spare debian OS which I can test this on so it won't matter if there are serious problems.
The code is well above my head but it's a simple and elegant approach. However, I was wondering if there were any further issues I need to be aware of?

ondoho · 02-05-2016, 01:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Higgsboson

I was wondering if there were any further issues I need to be aware of?

well, since you're asking...
this is not standard procedure and there's no 100% guarantee that it will work 100%.
in the future, remember to upgrade your system properly & regularly, and when debian changes releases, be extra alert and find out what you have to do, if you have to do sth, or what your choices are.

273 · 02-05-2016, 01:34 PM

My advice would be to take each dist-upgrade assuming it will break. Whether you can recover from that depends, perhaps, more upon your tenacity than your knowledge.
A clean install of the new version keeping home but being aware that any config files and directories may need to be deleted is the best bet, in my (not particularly educated) opinion.

Timothy Miller · 02-05-2016, 02:19 PM

1. Realized I had a typo in my recommendation. After the reboot it should be

Code:

sed -i 's/oldstable/stable/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

. Without that first ' you'd just get errors.

2. I'd probably print out "4.5. Possible issues during upgrade" section of the article I had linked to on Debians release-notes since it has the most common issues you'll see. Then go about doing the dist-upgrade. The FIRST dist-upgrade should be almost free of risk, since you're just making sure that everything is as up-to-date as possible from Wheezy's repos. It's the SECOND dist-upgrade to be worried about. I've done it MANY, MANY times, but when having a fully up and running system I've almost always ran into some form of small issue, usually some package breaking.

3. I agree with 273 that if you have a separate /home partition from /, that simply reinstalling a fresh copy of Jessie would easily be the most stress-free, headache-less method.

Higgsboson · 02-05-2016, 06:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ondoho

well, since you're asking...
this is not standard procedure and there's no 100% guarantee that it will work 100%.
in the future, remember to upgrade your system properly & regularly, and when debian changes releases, be extra alert and find out what you have to do, if you have to do sth, or what your choices are.

Yes, I'm just getting used to the idea of dist-upgrades. With MS, we can't upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 8 - we have to buy a new disk and do a fresh install.
So I can now see how upgrading Wheezy to Jessie from the repos can be a challenge.

Higgsboson · 02-05-2016, 06:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 273

My advice would be to take each dist-upgrade assuming it will break. Whether you can recover from that depends, perhaps, more upon your tenacity than your knowledge.
A clean install of the new version keeping home but being aware that any config files and directories may need to be deleted is the best bet, in my (not particularly educated) opinion.

I see. However, I didn't place /home into a seperate partition.
I think I'm going to get a debian 8.2 disk and simply install to a new partition. Once I've done that, can I use the same disk to install several Jessie OSs onto many partitions?

Higgsboson · 02-05-2016, 07:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Timothy Miller

1. Realized I had a typo in my recommendation. After the reboot it should be

Code:

sed -i 's/oldstable/stable/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

. Without that first ' you'd just get errors.

Ha ha, I saw the missing apostrophe. Thank you for the correction.

Quote:

It's the SECOND dist-upgrade to be worried about. I've done it MANY, MANY times, but when having a fully up and running system I've almost always ran into some form of small issue, usually some package breaking.

I will be using the method on a spare debian OS. However, if it fails and I boot my pc, will I be able to get to the grub menu allowing me to open my functioning debian OSs?

Quote:

3. I agree with 273 that if you have a separate /home partition from /, that simply reinstalling a fresh copy of Jessie would easily be the most stress-free, headache-less method.

I'm going to install Jessie from disk. However, I'll be doing an update on how my dist-upgrade goes. Many thanks for the code!

Higgsboson · 02-07-2016, 02:34 AM

I have used the coding for the dist-upgrade and it has worked correctly but brought in some new problems.
On my first debian distro I have Jessie installed:

Code:

uname -a
Linux debianIII 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt20-1+deb8u2 (2016-01-02) x86_64 GNU/Linux

Also, Iceweasel is updated to 38.5.0. So the dist-upgrade has been successful.
However, I've lost sound on the OS. This happened on my original install and I eventually found a way round the problem (something to do with pavucontrol, I think).

On my second debian distro, the dist-upgrade kept saying there was possible missing firmware for rtl8169. I can log into the upgraded OS and I have internet access, but it won't open up a terminal, and again I've lost sound.
However, I think the kernel and packages have switched to Jessie so I'll resolve this thread and start threads for my new problems.