Re: How to "downgrade" to testing?

[Paul Mackinney <paul@mackinney.net>]

Jonathan Melhuish declaimed:
> Although Debian "unstable" has actually proved pretty stable for me, I 
> am aware that it is the development version and hence I cannot moan in 
> the slightest if somebody breaks something.  Upon further inspection, 
> the "testing" distribution would seem a much better choice (this is a 
> client machine behind a block-all firewall, so security is not a 
> consideration).
> 
> Everything procedure for "downgrading" that I have found so far seems 
> rather elaborate - is there really no easy way to do it?  As I say, I am 
> quite happy with the stability of my system, so I would be quite happy 
> to "freeze" it until newer versions make their way into the testing 
> distro, if this won't cause problems.
> 
> Any advice would be most appreciated! :-)
Dunno about the other advice, but here's how I downgraded:

Belt & suspenders
1. backed up
2. made a grub boot disk and learned how to use the grub shell to
identify my root partition and load the kernel images on it to boot.

The process
3. Edited my apt sources file and changed 'unstable' to 'testing'
everywhere.
4. Repeatedly ran 'apt-get dist-upgrade' until everything calmed down.

HTH, PM
-- 
Paul Mackinney
paul@mackinney.net