The Final Frontier. Upgrading Sarge to Etch

[Nigel Henry <cave.dnb@tiscali.fr>]

I have 3 Debian installs apart from Kubuntu. Each one was originally installed 
from Woody 3.0r2 cdroms. All 3 were upgraded to Sarge which was on testing at 
the time (there were a few problems). When Sarge went stable I kept 2 of the 
installs on stable, and the 3rd I left on testing, which is my current Etch 
install. I've now changed /etc/apt/sources for Etch,to Etch, rather than 
testing, as Etch is soon to become stable, and the 2 Sarge installs I'd 
changed from stable to Sarge. One Sarge install I'm about to change from 
Sarge to Etch, which is the one I'm attempting to upgrade to Etch. This will 
be fun.

I've copied /etc/cache/apt/archives from etch to the sarge install that I'm 
going to upgrade, so as to to save a bit of DL time, as I'm on dialup.

I'd love to have a backup  of the Sarge install, but have never been quite 
sure how to take it . I've read a bit about rdiff, but have never tried it.

Anyway I'm going for it. The main concern is the transition from Xfree86 to 
Xorg. I'll just have to see how that goes.

I'll post back in a day or so as to how the upgrade went. I've got 1.4GB of 
stuff in the archives, so perhaps the DL time might not be so long.

Be back soon.

Nigel.