I have Debian woody loaded and working. Can woody be updated to Sarge using
a dialup connection or is it not feasible? What are the alternative methods for
upgrading? Want to upgrade because I can't install firefox.
Thank you. Any help appreciated.
Dick

Well you can try. Likely all the packages you have in your system will be downloaded again. So in most cases this will take a long time. Actually I don't know if there's an easy way to upgrade it. Maybe you could get the CDs and then use apt locally on the cds. I don't know if sarge has CDs though.

yes, you could. It might take a week.

try updating your sources.list to sarge, hit #apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -d

and see how much time it's projecting.

Get a woody version of firefox here:
http://www.backports.org/debian/dist...x/binary-i386/

Read this site:
http://www.backports.org/

Order the cd/dvd's of Sarge as soon as it's stable. You'd be crazy to upgrade on dial-up. Can't quite understand I'm the only one saying this.

Dialup connections, apart from the unreliablility of connections, can really shoot your telephone bills to astronomical proportions if you plan to upgrade an entire OS using it (especially with KDE and other programs). I'm not even sure that it would be successful in any case (you might run into frequent server timeout issues and sometimes disconnections and such peculiar problems associated with dial up.

Best option would be to order the Sarge DVD or CD (once it's realeased) and then do an upgrade from it.

or go to an internet cafe and download/burn the ISOs there...

Thank you for the information on updating to Sarge.
How many CDs are required (full set of 15 or just 1, 2, or 3)?
What is a good source for buying these CDs?
Dick

1 is the normal installation CD. For the rest I think it depends on which packages you want to get upgraded. I think it's pretty likely you'll need pretty many CDs cause some packages are on different CDs etc. Maybe there's a list with packages somewhere.

Installing a base image using the Sarge net installer (http://www.nl.debian.org/devel/debian-installer), quiting straight out of tasksel and dselect and then running an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade on dialup, isn't as terrible as it sounds. Just head out for a beer and leave it running overnight.

Apt keeps partially downloaded debs, so you can always stop it and recontinue later. Admittedly we have flat rate phone costs in NZ (though the same in broadband is notoriously expensive due to monopolistic behaviour on the part of a company who shall remain nameless).

Cheers,

mj

I just finished upgrading from sarge to sid on 56K dialup. It took about 20 hours. Two or three times I lost connection, but if you just apt-get dist-ugrade again it will continue from where it left off.

Granted I don't have to pay extra for local telephone calls. Don't know what your situation is. And it will also depend on how many packages you have installed. I am just using fluxbox with minimal extras. With full KDE install it could take significantly longer.

Thank you all so much for your answers to my question. I appreciate the people on this board very much.
Dick

I upgraded mine via dial-up, it took 24 + - hours, just changed my sources.list http entries from stable to testing, if you run into errors read the errors section of the apt how-to @ this site http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ap...g-scanpackages