Hendrik Boom wrote:
Shuckydarns, hendrik. I'm gettin' spooked about this whole thing now. Thanks for the info. I have not been able to find a tutorial to upgrad the newer kernels/distros since a 2006 post. Appreciate the reply.On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 02:42:54PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 07:39:52PM +0200, sigi wrote:Hi Whit, last time I tried to dist-upgrade to squeeze, I got stuck in an (for me) unresolvable loop: The system wanted to upgrade the kernel-image and udev in one run - which failed. apt-get always complained, that the kernel-image needs the new udev-package to upgrade - and udev itself needed the new kernel-image... I don't know, if this problem still exists - if yes: you should find a way of not getting into this loop, where no "apt-get -f install" helped to stop this. I reinstalled lenny after this... ;)Yeah udev needs 2.6.27 or higher, so you have to upgrade the kernel first, then reboot, then do the whole upgrade. I have no idea what the plan for handling the upgrade is officially. Maybe the release notes are supposed to offer some hint.I've had problems like this several times, in several upgrades from an old stable to a new. Sometimes X, sometimes udev, and once running out of disk space for the upgrade. Usually I end up with an unusable system. Not acceptable for a production system.As a result I always copy the old stable system into separate partition(s), so that when an upgrade fails I can boot into the other copy and have Because of these problems on a production machine, I've gradually learned to copy the old stable system into a separate partition, and then chroot to that to upgrade the copy while the old system is still running.Of course, things go wrong this way, too. Some packages want to fiddle with /proc during upgrade, and it isn't there. I'm not at all sure whether to provide it. Often things can be patched by booting to the incompletely updated new system and resuming the upgrade. This does reduce the amount of time the productin system is in an unusable state.I'd really like it if there were to be viable instructions in the release notes how to upgrade in a chroot, but I've never seen them.-- hendrik
Thanks. Whit