Need a downgrade from etch/stable to sarge/stable

Hello

I successfully upgraded to etch stable a few days ago. But I didn't consider those nice proprietary apps I have installed on my server which don't run anymore (at the publishers site they state not to support debian newer than 3.1 - too late for me...)

So now, I need to downgrade again. Back to nice ol' sarge. The question is: how do I tell apt to downgrade all my packages?

I entered APT:efault-Release "sarge"; in /etc/apt/apt.conf and

Package: *
Pin: release a=sarge,o=debian
Pin-Priority: 2000 (yeah, I wanted to make sure...)

in /etc/apt/preferences

Then I did a apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade (shouldn't that called be downgrade in my case??? anyway...) The result is, well... nothing. No downgrade.

Unfortunately inserting a CD into the computer and reinstalling deb3.1 is not an option.

So I need a solution to downgrade my deb from an ssh terminal to sarge back again.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance

raven

You can try to do this, but it might balk. You need to change the /etc/apt/sources.list from stable to oldstable. Then undo the mess you made with the apt.conf file. Do an apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade. it might work, it might not. I'm inclined to think not. I've put some of our debian machines at work on the oldstable sources, and they stayed at sarge, but I was proactive with that, not reactive. Now that you have Etch, trying to upgrade/downgrade on a working system isn't likely to go well.

You said you can't reinstall, but didn't say why. If the upgrade instructions I gave you don't work, you may be stuck with a system that won't boot, or will boot but won't function.

Peace,
JimBass

Originally Posted by JimBass ...You need to change the /etc/apt/sources.list from stable to oldstable. Then undo the mess you made with the apt.conf file. Do an apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade. it might work, it might not...

This in fact doesn't work. I tried doing this last week. All it does is say "0 new 0 upgraded 0 removed" because all the packages installed are NEWER than whats on the repo. I upgraded from Lenny to Sid, but forgot my ATI proprietary drivers do not work on the Xorg in Sid. Oops...

However, after I tried what JimBass had mentioned, I removed ALL xorg packages from my system, then reinstalled them. This forced apt to fetch new .deb files from the repo (which now points back to Lenny) so it pulled a "downgrade" on Xorg stuff. But I am stuck with a mixed system like this for a while now.

I honestly don't think it is possible to do a FULL downgrade to all packages, once they've been upgraded, but that doesn't mean its not possible.