RE: Upgrade to woody
David Smead <smead@amplepower.com> wrote:
http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/ says . . .
testing's gone mainline! Point apt at the new "testing" distribution
(or the old "woody" distribution) on your favourite Debian mirror.
knuth:~# apt-get install testing
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package testing
Does anyone have the real instructions?
--
Sincerely,
David Smead
Note the date on that message at the bottom. It is NOT recent!
The phrase "Point apt at the new "testing" distribution..." means
changing your /etc/apt/sources.list file to get it's stuff from the
Debian "testing" (or currently "Woody"...same thing right now) tree
rather than the "stable" (or Potato) tree. The easisest way to do this
is to edit your sources.list file and change all refereneces to "stable"
(or Potato) to "testing".
This is the EASIEST, but not necessarily the BEST method. Apt-Get is a
very powerful tool, and seems to be getting better as time goes along.
There are major improvements and additions between "stable" and
"testing". With the versions out of "testing" I have been running for
the last 6-9 months you can set it up to pull packages from different
Debian file trees at the same time by using the "preferences" option(s).
That means that you can mix packages from "unstable" and "testing" or
any other combination you want. This is NOT in the version in "stable"
to the best of my knowledge.
After you have your system looking at the right ftp or http "sources"
tree, then the command you want depends upon what you want to do. I
gather from the above that you want to install the "testing" version on
a machine probably running "stable". In this case, the command(s) in
theory would be:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
But since 'testing" is not quite finalized, this may (read "will")
produce some rough spots for you. The changes between the two are quite
significant! If you are not familiar with the potential problems and
how to recover from them then you could wind up with a system that is
un-usable. It is advisable to peruse these mailing lists and see what
others have exerienced in this regard. There is no one single "recipe"
for doing a "dist-upgrade" from "stable" to "testing" at this point in
time. It is even more difficult if you are using an older version of
Debian, like "slink". It has been my experience that the fastest,
cleanest, and most trouble-free method of getting testing on your
computer is to start from scratch and use any of the installation
methods mentioned in the docs at:
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/disks-i386/current/doc/.
I particularly like the "boot-floppy" method and installing from the
internet over my Cable Modem connection. Backup old data/files you want
to keep of course... The time spent doing a "clean" install from the
internet is about the same as doing a "dist-upgrade", and MUCH smoother!
You save LOTS of time in de-bugging and correcting install errors.
I suggest you become familiar with with the man pages on these subjects
before you try to mess around with them. There are also LOTS of threads
on these mailing lists on using the "preferences" options as well as
problems encountered using the "dist-upgrade" option. Suggested reading:
MAN: apt, apt-get, sources.list + any references listed at the bottom of
each.
MAILING LISTS: Debian-User, Debian-Testing
Cheers,
-Don Spoon-
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