Upgrading potato to woody
Hello,
I know have a cousin who lives in England (opposite side of the globe
to me; so I can't do much to help myself).
He says he purchased what he thought was a set of 7 CDs with the
latest stable version of Debian (woody).
Only thing is, that based on his description of the CD, it sounds
like an old version of woody.
It also sounds like he has a very broken system.
Some of his descriptions given are:
> Could be. The Readme document on CD1 stated: "Upgrading If you are
> already running an older version of the Debian GNU/Linux Operating
> System, you may want to upgrade to version 3.0. At this moment,
> woody-specific upgrade procedures are not yet available. In the mean
> time, use the potato procedures, available on your local Debian mirror
> in the /debian/dists/potato/main/upgrade-i386/ directory." (See below)
> but this seems to have been bad advice ;-)."
I am wondering if you got a prerelease of woody? Is it normal for
the stable instructions of one release to point ot the instructions
of the prior release? This CDROM sounds very dodgy to me.
> Yes, I am rather worried this may be the case. There is conflicting
> information in the Readme. It says both
>
> About This CD
> This CD-ROM is labeled
>
> Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 r0 "Woody" - Official i386 Binary-1
>
> **AND**
>
> Last-Minute Notes
>
> "* You should keep in mind that this is an unofficial CD of the current
> development version of the Debian system. This means that all sorts of
> bugs may be present anywhere in the system."
>
> The disks are certainly *labelled* as 3.0 Official disks, but perhaps I
> was sold pre-release software as stable. In which case, I would have to
> ask for a refund/exchange as the disks were sold as Official not
> Pre-Release.
He tried (as per potato instructions):
> installed new versions of dpkg (1.6.13) and apt (0.3.19) from
> /debian/dists/potato/main/upgrade-i386 on my nearest mirror (apparantly
> there is no equivilant for woody yet so you have to use the update
> procedure from potato, except with woody disks):
>
> # dpkg -i dpkg_1.6.13_i386.deb
> (warned me was overwriting more recent version)
> # dpkg -i apt_0.3.19_i386.deb
> (no change in version number)
>
> # apt-cdrom add
> (added all 7 cd's, starting at 1 and ending at 7)
>
> # apt-get
>
> # apt-get --fix-broken --show-upgraded --simulate dist-upgrade | pager
> This showed a LOT of programs with other programs in [square brackets]
> after them - broken dependencies I presume. Excpet all the programs
> mentioned in the [square brackets] that I could be bothered to check
> were listed in the 'programs to be upgraded' section.
> Anyway, tried -
>
> # apt-get --fix-broken --show-upgraded dist-upgrade
> It asks for disk 1, scans it and then quits saying
> "E: Internal Error, Could not perform immediate configuration"
>
> Naturally I also tried installing by booting up with the cd in the drive
> and using the installation software. However, not only would this wipe
> my current Debian setup (not desirable?!) but it could not see my scsi
> disk.
>
> I had also tried without updating dpkg and apt.
[...]
> The helpful upgrade advice very strongly suggested that dselect was used
> instead of apt-get or dpkg, saying that dselect made more 'sensible'
> decisions about dependencies.
I refered him to the woody update instructions, but that didn't help
either.
Any ideas?
I do not use the CD-ROMS myself, so I do not know if this is normal
or not. I am somewhat skeptical.
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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