[Techtalk] debian upgrade

Akkana Peck akkana at shallowsky.com
Sun Oct 19 21:13:30 UTC 2008


Anne Wainwright writes:
> However, I now find that I do not have an Etch system, but a fully updated Sarge system, which is shown by the sources in /etc/apt/sources.list. This shows in Aptitude, but unless you maximise the sources window you don't see the 'distro' column.
> 
> Dare I change 'sarge' to 'woody' or will I foul up the whole thing by doing that? For sure it won't update the kernel. B i g question.

Do you mean change it to "etch" , or do you really mean woody?
Woody is an older release than sarge, so you'd be asking your
system to downgrade everything. I doubt that would work at all.

Doing an upgrade (like changing "sarge" to "etch") is definitely
do-able. But whole system upgrades often run into difficulties for
unexpected reasons (running out of disk space at the wrong time, or
hitting one package that has a problem with a postinstall script, or
any number of other possible problems). If you avoid aptitude as an
"experts only" command, you may want to think twice about trying to
upgrade your system via any form of apt, since you can get into
situations that are a lot harder to solve than just running aptitude.

I don't want to scare you off -- I prefer doing upgrades myself,
since on my systems they usually have fewer problems than installers --
but I do sometimes have to stop in the middle and spend half an hour
coming up with a way around some kind of mysterious horkage.

If you decide to try it, make sure you make a backup first that's
as complete as possble, and read the howtos people have already
written. For example, the first three hits when I google upgrade
sarge etch are:
http://wiki.debian.org/Sarge2EtchUpgrade
http://www.debianadmin.com/upgrade-sarge-to-etch.html
http://www.debiantutorials.org/content/view/103/133/

	...Akkana


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