Weblog entry #22 for e5z8652
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Dear Googlebot:
I'm going through the process of upgrading Lenny machines to Squeeze after the freeze. After I'm done at work, only my pair of Squid servers will be Lenny. (They wait until Squeeze is stable.) While online I see a lot of evidence that people are having trouble with this upgrade, and thought I would share.
The key is getting the new kernel in place before you attempt the full upgrade.
This process works very smoothly, although it does require an extra reboot:
sed -i s/lenny/squeeze/ /etc/apt/sources.list
aptitude update
aptitude install linux-image-2.6-686
Of course your kernel architecture might be different (amd64, etc.). Follow the prompts to install the kernel.
Aptitude will pull in perl, so you might want to include that on the command line to save a "y" or two.
(Note that I keep recommends turned off in apt.conf, so perl is the only major package pulled in on my systems. If you have recommends on you might get more.)
***reboot***
aptitude full-upgrade
Note that doing the full-upgrade right away will leave you with a heck of a mess to untangle when apt tries to upgrade udev, but udev won't install on the running kernel. Then a whole set of key packages will fail to install, and aptitude will start finding crazy solutions to resolve the mess -- removing 3/4 of KDE while upgrading the rest, etc.
Much easier to just install the kernel and perl first and then let aptitude do it's thing.
Comments on this Entry
That was very concise information.
Much more distilled than the Etch to Lenny upgrade from Debian's information.
Makes it seem painless and simple, I might just try it...
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
I always try to build a stable desktop system in a VM (Qemu or VirtualBox) and then do a dry run at the upgrade first. It isn't a perfect solution but I find it does help head off those issues that aptitude can't fix it's self. I usually end up doing one or two manual package deletes before it upgrades automatically then I manually put back the bits I want.
So far I've never had a box I couldn't upgrade, I've just had a few that took a few minutes of fiddling to get round a road block.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
But generally things have gone very well during transitions. I have one box left that has been continuously upgraded from Woody, and is waiting for Squeeze to release.
I had two, but during a hardware move I messed up and ended up having to re-install with Lenny. Sad, sad day. :(
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