Updating AntiX from 16 to 17. Can I do it via apt?
 

I notice that AntiX-17 is finally out. I would like to know if AntiX-16 can be upgraded to AntiX-17 by editing /etc/apt/sources and then doing an apt-get distupgrade. This is the preferred way of upgrading Debian, but I don't know if it would work in AntiX, which has a much more complex repository structure.

In the past, they've only mentioned in-place upgrading for minor versions, like 16.1 to 16.2, and the release notes for full versions don't mention it. I notice that there are quite a few new things in 17, so I'd not risk it. But as a LFS user, you're braver than I!

If you've got a separate /home, just install 17 over 16; if you haven't got a separate /home, now you know why you should. :)

It is possible, but YMMV

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/to...de-to-antix17/

Just reinstall sounds lovely, but last night I remembered that oldboy can't boot from usb. And the full AntiX-17 image is too big for a CD (the first time in AntiX history that that's happened, I think). I could do a smaller install and then add packages like libreoffice and cups, but if updating in situ can work, then I think I'll try it.

I don't have a separate home partition on oldboy but that's because I don't keep any data on it. I only use it as a print server. It hosts the only working printer that I have right now. I originally intended to dump to it too, but I had to give that idea up because the hard drive isn't big enough to take bigboy's dumps. Nowadays I dump by ftp to littleboy, my laptop. Life gets complicated!

If I wanted to use a usb stick with the new image as an apt source to save on downloading, what would I have to add to my sources list?

That looks simple enough
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=128635

Incidentally, I had a "senior moment" the other day: I now distinctly remember updating from 13.37 via the internet, following the very precise instructions on what to add and what to delete!

Your reference is to use of a physical cd/dvd. I found a few of those but none for for an iso image on a usb drive.

Further: I just mounted the drive on bigboy to take a look at it. Everything except the boot files is in a squashfs. I can't use that as a repository, unless I can persuade apt that the whole iso image is actually a cdrom. Which is worth trying I suppose.

The 'Base' version of AntiX still fits on a CD, you could use that to install with.
Possibly, unpack the squashfs of 'full' on another machine, & copy what you want; or just download the .deb's that you want, copy to your new install & use 'dpkg -i' to install.

Now that's a brilliant idea! I can certainly unpack it on bigboy using Debian, maybe even on littleboy using AntiX itself. That has a stock kernel so it probably has the squashfs driver. But I wouldn't like to use dpkg because of the dependency problem.

Apparently, all you need to do with a directory of deb packages to make it fully usable by apt is to use a tool called dpkg-scanpackages (it's in dpkg-dev) to create an index, then add the url for the directory to /etc/apt/sources.list.

Just to update:

I mounted the iso image, then mounted the squash image inside it and had a look at it. No joy there! No .deb packages at all, just a fully installed AntiX system. Looks like installation to the hard drive is a simple copying job; there's no unpacking at all. So, as I can't actually boot from that stick, I wasted time and bandwidth making it.

I'm going to try to update it over the Internet. That's the best solution, I think.

I ran the grand update on oldboy yesterday. It took nearly four hours! Well, it's an old machine with very little processing power by modern standards, and the Internet connection is a slow one via a wifi dongle.

So far I've not been able to get a working desktop. X is running but you can't see anything on the screen, just a thin blue stripe at the top. I logged in blind and the disk noises told me that my login had been accepted and my desktop loaded so it's probably a video driver problem. I can log in at a console of course.

I will try installing a package called xserver-xorg-legacy, which this AntiX release provides, presumably because the new xserver-xorg doesn't work on all machines. Hopefully this will get my desktop back, but if the worst comes to the worst, I will still be able to run the machine in text mode as a print server. Not that I really need a print server now that I have got my new Brother printer on bigboy.

PS I'm still running the old kernel. Apt-get didn't offer me a new one.

OK, the desktop is fixed. The problem was that X was using the vesa driver, which is supposed to be general-purpose but doesn't work on oldboy's archaic intel chip. I edited xorg.conf to replace vesa with intel and now it works. Curiously I still have the same wallpaper as before.

I checked out kernels in synaptic. According to online info, AntiX-17 uses 4.10, but the newest that synaptic showed me was 4.9. I await enlightenment.

Conky doesn't work and I don't know why. I get a display but the actual numbers and graphs are blocked out. Somehow the data isn't getting through.

I've sometimes had to kill conky and restart it to clear it up.

@ Hazel
I've just installed 4.14.14 kernel on my AntiX box the other day, it's the latest I know of, & it went without a hitch for me.

In my case it was,

This is a very old thread and all the problems I described are solved now. For anyone who is still interested, here is an update:

For conky I just needed a special legacy package. The tiresome flickering of roxterm was solved by getting rid of it and using an alternative terminal. I installed Debian's new version of the 4.9 LTS kernel, which is patched for meltdown, and discovered by trial and error that I need the version with pae to get X to work. But everything works now.