Upgrade from Sarge to Etch Satisfactorily Completed

[alan@patriot.net]

Yesterday was a horrendous day!  My goal was to upgrade my
ancient sarge distribution to etch, using my three etch
DVDs.  It is a complicated problem because my DVD Reader/player
is external, connected through USB, and my BIOS won't allow
booting from it.

Because of foolish mistakes of mine(don't ask!) it turned out I
had to trash my / and /boot partitions, and completely reinstall
sarge, from my ancient and well-used pile of 12 sarge CDs.  This
took a while<ggrrr>.

I then ran  apt-cdrom -d /media/dvd add.   (Remark: I had of
course made sure that /media/dvd had been created and that I
could mount a DVD on that mount point.  And I guess it is
important to note that this was all kosherly<g> entered in my
/etc/fstab)

After some incantations of " . . . upgrade" -- doesn't seem ever
to hurt -- I followed the absolutely inspirational advice of
Florian Kulzer, and made a file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/apt.conf,
with the one line:
       Acquire::cdrom::mount "/media/dvd";
(for safety's sake, following a tidbit in the Release Documentation,
I put a symlink to that in /etc/apt/ .

>From then, paying careful attention to warnings, and of course being
thoroughly backed up, the process of running
        apt-get dist-upgrade
(maybe I used aptitude, already I've suppressed the details of
yesterday<g>)  was fairly routine.

I'm writing this a) as a Shout of Triumph(Yes, debian, if one
labors hard enough, Does Work), and b) as a note of thanks and
public acknowledgement to Florian Kulzer.

Best wishes to all,

Alan, a certified Etcher

-- 
Alan McConnell :  http://patriot.net/users/alan
    "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
    Impeachment proceedings should be started immediately.