[H-GEN] Upgrading Debian from Potato

Tony Nugent tony at linuxworks.com.au
Fri Feb 17 22:57:42 EST 2006


> -----Original Message-----
> From: general-bounces at lists.humbug.org.au [mailto:general-
> bounces at lists.humbug.org.au] On Behalf Of Greg Black
> Sent: Saturday, February 18, 2006 7:38 AM
> To: Geoff Shang
> Cc: general at lists.humbug.org.au
> Subject: Re: [H-GEN] Upgrading Debian from Potato

Greg Black wrote:

> On 2006-02-18, Geoff Shang wrote:

[ stuff about upgrading debian linux ]

> In general, upgrading is a poorly-understood operation and it
> provides a large number of opportunities for mysterious foot
> shooting episodes.  As a rule, unless there are peculiar
> operational constraints or you have the skills, perseverance and
> time to deal with the potential problems, it's far better to
> follow the much safer process of doing a fresh install:
> 
>   * backup all your data to alternate media or to another box
>   * do a full fresh install of the new OS
>   * configure and test the new OS
>   * restore your data

Amen to that.  Having been down the road of attempting upgrades "over the top"
of existing systems (mostly redhat/fedora boxes), I can testify from experience
that doing a fresh install and then moving over all your backed-up data and
(some of) your original system configuration files (with care), then you'll save
yourself a lot of potential additional effort and headaches. (In fact, the
standard system config tools were good enough to reconfigure the system anyway -
apart from various user/group accounts and my highly-tweaked samba config
files).

Good luck.  Debian Sarge seem to have a good reputation, and if you are familiar
with Debian itself, then you are a long way there already.  I installed it (into
a VMware image) only recently from a recent dvd from APC mag; it required a few
updates, but that was easily done and it seems to be working just fine (as you
would expect).

My particular issue for looking at it, was to become familiar with Debian
itself, eg, it is missing sendmail and some of the networking tools I'm more
used to (like /sbin/ip). But postfix was easy to figure out and ifconfig (etc)
was enough to do what I needed with the networking.

Cheers
Tony Nugent
Home: +61 7 5526 8020






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