etch to lenny upgrade- any kernel related pitfalls?

sonichedgehog · 01-01-2008, 06:17 PM

After flirting with other distros I'm returning to Debian as I really don't have time to wrestle with unzipping and make'ing packages and hoping I haven't missed something fatal in a readme buried somewhere...

Neglected to bookmark an excellent post a little while ago about the need to upgrade the kernel before upgrading everything else to lenny... I have done an upgrade like that before without problems using sources.list but probably benefited from beginners' luck.

Does anyone either remember the post of have any other knowledge of this issue? Thanks- Phil

armanox · 01-01-2008, 06:21 PM

I have not had any issues with Lenny thus far. using apt-get dist-upgrade upgraded the system to lenny quite smoothly. The only issue I can think of would be do not interupt the upgrade.

sonichedgehog · 01-02-2008, 06:55 AM

Thanks for that, altho having thought it through I'll probably go straight to Lenny on a new system I'm building.

sycamorex · 01-03-2008, 04:30 AM

As far as I remember, I had some slight problems with Nvidia drivers. There are no nvidia kernel modules in etch repositories, you'll need to get them from sid repos or the official driver from nvidia website. At least that was the situation just after releasing lenny.

sonichedgehog · 01-03-2008, 04:37 AM

Had to use a I386 disk on a Pentium Duo but that's posted in general forum... that was an etch ISO and I upgraded to lenny via sources.list

Monitor then read "out of range"- edited Xorg.conf- am posting that separately as it seems to be a recurrent problem not just on my present monitor.

drokmed · 01-12-2008, 10:50 PM

I recently did an upgrade from Etch to Lenny on my laptop. I did it from within X, and it had problems, gave warnings and error, but still went through.

I highly recommend you do the upgrade from the console (no gui).

I documented my experience if your interested:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=22855

sonichedgehog · 01-14-2008, 05:31 PM

Interesting thread (as per drokmed's link), what comes through is that Debian is a resilient system and lots of methods get a good result. I tend to run scared and backup any file before a change, and I comment out bits in my sources list instead of erasing them- eg I sometimes uncomment the "sid" line if I want a walk on the wild side then comment it out again when I've had a play. I used the gui not console for the upgrade ("apply all").

btw when I started this thread I was having hard disk problems, so everything I did at that time was flaky.