Re: building an etch box

[Chris Lale <chrislale@untrammelled.co.uk>]

David Clymer wrote:

> On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 14:00 -0800, Tim Jordan wrote:
>  
>
> > After building a debian box with the debian-31r1a-i386-netinst.iso I 
> > want to upgrade this box to unstable.  What is the correct way to do 
> > this?  I'm thinking I have to change my /etc/apt/sources.list to read 
> > unstable, but that didn't work.
> >
> > Do I have to --dist-upgrade to testing first then update my sources.list 
> > and do another --dist-upgrade to unstable?
> >    
>
> My guess is that if you don't know how to do this, then you probably
> lack the skills necessary to deal with breakage that can occasionally
> occur in the unstable branch. If your motivation is to get access to
> more up to date software, I would suggest just running testing ("etch").
> However, you're free to do what you like.
>
> To upgrade to unstable:
>
> 1. edit /etc/apt/sources.list so that any instances of "stable" or
> "sarge" are replaced with "unstable"
> 2. apt-get update
> 3. apt-get dist-upgrade
>
> -davidc
>  
I upgraded from Sarge to Etch 2 or 3 months ago. First I tried using 
Synaptic which failed part way through. Then I tried

# aptitude update
# aptitude dist-upgrade

This also failed to complete, and gave many errors.

Finally I used 

# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade

which upgraded with no errors. Were you using apt-get? What error messages did you get?

Chris.