[NBLUG/talk] personal server upgrade... strategy?

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 11:53:54AM -0700, A'fish'ionado wrote:
> Can I hop in here and ask a newbie question? :-)

Of course.  Newbie questions are always welcome on this list.

> It was never clear to me how to change releases in Debian, and the manpages
> haven't helped me. Could someone at least point me at some website that
> explains this?

Well, I'm thinking this is easiest to answer with an example.

Look in /etc/apt/sources.list -- you'll see a bunch of lines something like
these two:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ sarge main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main

Now, that can be a tad confusing, but really there's just 4 things on either
of those lines:
First, "deb" says what the rest of the line is pointing at.
Second, there's a URL; that's the base.
Third is the distribution under that URL.
Fourth is one *or more* sub-collections in that distribution.

So, unless you've done something non-standard in /etc/apt/apt.conf or
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d ("APT::Default-Release" setting) or
/etc/apt/preferences, all you do is change the third item on every line in
/etc/apt/sources.list to the distribution you want.


So, in this example, you'd change "sarge" to "stable".

Then, after you've made the change to /etc/apt/sources.list, run "apt-get
update ; apt-get upgrade" to update your local cache and then upgrade to
what's in the new distribution.


(it happens that at this point in time, sarge and stable are synonymous, so
no actual change would occur from following this specific example -- in the
future when etch becomes stable, with "stable" in your file, you'd
automatically get etch at that point -- with "sarge" you'd continue getting
the 'oldstable' that sarge became at that point)


-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder, Scribe and InstallFest Coordinator
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit
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