Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian
On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 10:28:57AM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
I've run across someone who says her machine is running Debian
oldoldoldstable or maybe even oldoldoldoldstable, and who consequently
can't upgrade to newer Debian.
It's easier to say the code name than oldoldoldoldodlodlsdosdld.
I seem to recall that there *is* a way to do step-wise upgrades of such
old systems, i.e. upgrading from oldoldoldoldstable to oldoldoldstable,
then to oldoldstable, then to oldstable, then to stable. However, I'm
stumped as to how to actually get started on doing that.
The order of the releases is documented at
https://www.debian.org/releases/
Basically, adjust the sources.list to point to each one in oder, and do
the upgrades. Check the release notes for each upgrade to see if special
steps are necessary.
The last few steps of this are straightforward; oldoldstable is still
available in the repos, as far as I'm aware. The first ones are more of
a problem; if I understand matters correctly, anything prior to
oldoldstable is removed from the live repos, although its .deb files are
still maintained on e.g. snapshot.debian.org. (Which doesn't really
suffice for the equivalent of a dist-upgrade, because you'd have to
manually download all the correct .debs by hand and then install them
with dpkg.)
Use archive.debian.org instead of ftp.debian.org or whatever for very
old releases.
Mike Stone
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