Re: Installing potato

[David Coe <david.coe@someotherplace.org>]

esl <esl@cio.med.va.gov> writes:

> Can someone please help me. I would like to install potato. I started
> with resc1440.bin found under potato subtree. 

Last I kenw, you shouldn't use those unless you want to help develop
them; they're really not ready yet.  Join the debian-boot mailing list
if you want to help.

> I have successfully installed slink using apt. 

You're in good shape, then.  You can (relatively) easily upgrade from
a stable slink to unstable potato using apt and/or dselect.

Be aware that potato is still changing, and may be changing *while*
you're downloading it, so you may stumble a couple of times, but it's
do-able.

First, be sure you have the current slink apt and dpkg; woudln't hurt
to be sure you're current on everything else in slink too, by doing
apt-get clean; apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; apt-get clean.  If you
encounter errors, ask for help and get them fixed (or removed) _before_
making the jump to potato.

Then update your /etc/apt/sources.list to point to potato, e.g. I
changed mine as follows:

###-slink-###
#deb http://security.debian.org/ slink updates
#deb ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/gnome-1.0/debian slink main
#deb http://ftp1.us.debian.org/debian slink main contrib non-free
#deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US slink non-US

###-potato-###
deb http://http.debian.org/debian potato main contrib non-free
deb http://non-us.debian.org/ potato non-US/main non-US/contrib non-US/non-free

Note the new format, including the space after the /, for the non-US
stuff; there are probably other ways, but the above works.

Now, if you have the time and disk space, you can do a mass upgrade
with:

  apt-get clean
  apt-get update
  apt-get dist-upgrade
  apt-get clean 

Of course the dist-upgrade is the one that will take some time.

If you don't have the time or disk space to do it all at once, or just
want to pick and choose your upgrade steps, i.e. do what's most
important to you first, you should use dselect:

  Set [A]ccess to "apt"
  Do an [U]pdate
  Use [S]elect to put the updated things you *don't* immediately
    care about on hold (flag them '='); Dselect will complain if
    you try to upgrade too few things (i.e. don't satisfy dependencies)
    at once -- if you're new to Dselect, read the help carefully; it 
    does work but is a bit difficult to get your mind around at first.
  Use [I]nstall to download and upgrade the non-held packages
  Go back to [U]pdate and do the next batch of things you care to
    upgrade.

If dist-upgrade or [I]nstall is unable to find some of the required
files, let it run through what it can find, and then do the update
again and try again.  If it encounters packages that it can't
configure because of dependency problems, let it keep going, and just
try the [I]nstall or dist-upgrade again when it gives up.  You may
have to do that a few times.

Eventually, you'll have a reasonably good potato system, but might
have a few packages that couldn't install or configure ... sometimes
removing (purging) and reinstalling those will fix it.  If not, ask
here (post the details) for help.  

(If you run 'script' before running apt-get or dselect, you'll get a
disk file containing all the terminal interaction, which might be very
valuable later when you're trying to reconstruct what went wrong.)

If you do it on a good day and/or lead a charmed life, nothing will go
wrong at all.  I've actually seen it happen.

Good Luck and enjoy.