A warning how not to upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze
Hi,
I recently upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze. I did the upgrade rather
haphazardly without much preplanning and the procedure turned out to
be a bit of a nightmare.
I acknowledge that Squeeze is not fully released (just frozen), so I
understand that there may not be any official upgrade guide yet (and I
certainly imagine it would look different to what I attempted). So
what follows is *not* a criticism of Debian, but I hope it might serve
as a warning to others. :) (Perhaps it may help some technical guys
debug the upgrade process, or perhaps it might help someone who is
attempting a naive upgrade like I did.)
Here's what I did..
I updated /etc/apt/sources.list => s/lenny/squeeze/
I then tried "aptitude update && aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude".
This presented me with a solution that looked too broke for my taste,
so I didn't apply it.
I then tried "aptitude safe-upgrade", this looked sensible so I gave
it a shot. This fell over with a few package configuration errors, so
I repeatedly tried "aptitude safe-upgrade" / "aptitude full-upgrade"
in alternate shots. This iterated for a while with different errors
each time until eventually I ended up with a system without aptitude
installed.
I then tried "apt-get -f install", several times, which seemed to
clear up a lot of things. Eventually my repeated "apt-get -f install"
commands were just giving me the same udev error message. Apparently
udev and the kernel need to be updated at the same time, but none of
the tools would let me install the new kernel and udev (too many
broken packages at the same time I think).
I found a magic file that I could touch (/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade) to
cause the udev config step to go ahead regardless (even though it knew
my kernel wasn't up to it). I then did more rounds of "apt-get -f
install" to clear up some more pending mess. I now had udev but no
corresponding kernel to work with it. Now would have been a very bad
time to reboot. :)
I then manually used "apt-get install" to ensure that I had the new
udev compatible kernel (linux-image-2.6-amd64 in my case)..
I then went back to "aptitude full-upgrade" for a few more iterations,
and eventually the system converged with no errors.
After a reboot the system was pretty much fine except that X freaked
out. I had to just empty the xorg.conf file, and it seems happy again
now.
Everything else like the new boot scripts, upgrade to grub2, new
kernel, etc are working great.
--
Paul Richards
@pauldoo
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