I am trying to upgrade my debian installation. After running apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade, it just hangs on this message

176 upgraded, 24 newly installed, 8 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/199MB of archives.
After unpacking 7477kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
Preconfiguring packages ...
xserver-xorg config warning: migrating xserver-xfree86 templates to
xserver-xorg.

I have tried this a good few times and left it up to 20 minutes (on a nice fast newish machine). Any ideas whats going on. Top shows that my processor isn;t busy doing anything and no errors are reported. What should I do?

Hopefully you're doing the upgrade from console with x off.
Let it run...its just useing the xfree cfg for xorg.
You will most likely need to re-install video drivers after the upgrade to xorg to get back into X.

I had the same problem today after I changed from xf86 to xorg. I should probably update the video driver and try again. Is there an easy way to stop X. Ctr-Alt-Backspace restarts. The way I do it now is to edit the XF86Config file so that no screens can be found and then restart X. this makes X crash and then I can log in without X. There's got to be a smarter way.
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Start in a different runlevel. Open /etc/inittab. Then one of the first lines is default runlevel. Change the number to 2 that'll start you in the command line. If you want to stop X you can kill your desktop manager. But the best way is using CTRL-ALT-FX. CTRL-ALT-F1 will bring you to a command line. In a default situation CTRL-ALT-F7 will bring you back to the GUI. This might differ though, if you changed the number of virtual terminals starting. So you might have to search with the F keys a bit till you find the proper ones.

Ctr-Alt-F1 to F7 won't shut down the X server. It will still be running in the background. If I want to install nvidia drivers for ex, I need to close X completely. Isn't that correct?
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You don't need to shutdown X to update anything and the nvidia drivers don't need reinstalled or anything, I did the xfree->xorg migration without restarting anything until after the packages were finished doing their thing.

Well if you need it killed completely you have to kill your desktop manager. So kdm, gdm, xdm or edm whatever it is that you're running.

I'm running kde, so I tried 'kill kdm', but it didn't work. Then I ran top and saw that XFree86 had pid 4344, so I killed it, but it had the same effect as Ctr-Alt-Del. X was restarted. Isn't there an 'init' command that kills X?
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No, Debian doesn't use a seperate runlevel for X like other distros do. Debian treats the display managers just like any other service, so to stop kdm you would just type '/etc/init.d/kdm stop'.

That did the trick, just killed X and got back by using '/etc/init.d/kdm start'. Just using startx gave me a strange screen resolution. Thanks!
How does it work in other distros? Do you switch to init 3?
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