Re: Changing from Stable to Testing/Unstable
On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 06:51:13AM -0800, Alejandro Salas wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> When I installed it I went for the Stable version, but
> now I'm thinking of switching over either to Testing
> or to Unstable. First I wanted to ask how unstable the
> Unstable distro is?.
Normally, Unstable seems to be livable for people who like to
tinker with their systems instead of just using them.
Testing is the one I use every day. The only problem I've had
with upgrades is that I had to let it uninstall the
kaffeine package for the rest of the upgrade to work.
I have both sarge(stable) *and* etch(testing) installed on my
regular-use machine. (dual boot) Usually I use etch. If
it has trouble (such as when one of my children wants to use Kaffeine)
I boot the other one.
> Cuz I heard that most of the time
> you can work with it pretty well. The other thing is,
> Do I need to reinstall the system?, or is there a safe
> way to change distros without reinstalling?.Being as
> paranoid as I am I'll probably reinstall, but I wanted
> to know anyway.
Make sure you have a backup in case the upgrade has trouble.
One of my upgrades ran out of disk space while upgrading. The
upgrade seems to use a *lot* more space temporarily than the
final system needs permanently. Apparently this is because
it downloads *all* the packages it thinks you need before it
installs *any* of them.
If you have /home on a different partition from /, you can:
create a new partition, and copy the entire / partition to it.
Modify the boot loader so you can boot into either of the two.
(Both systems can use the same /home partition). Remember
to modify the boot configuration on *both* systems. It's
really useful to have an extra system around in case things go wrong.
Then boot into the one you want to upgrade, and upgrade that one too.
I used this scheme on my network gateway machine when upgrading
from woody to sarge, and. except for the time taken to reboot
to test that both systems were working, the users continued to
use the system during the entire upgrade process (which took hours!)
My system continued running even when the upgrade got wedged because
of lack of disk space!
-- hendrik
>
> Thanx for everything.
> Alejandro
>
>
>
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