Upgrade DL360 Debian Sarge to Etch

[Karsten Riechel]

We run two DL360 G5 here with Debian Sarge, runs fine.

We now plan to upgrade to Debian Etch. Is it possible to do this, if yes, how? Is it recommendable to upgrade?

Thanks a lot for all your answers and best regards.

ric

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

Sarge is a venerable, reliable release I've been seeing questions on it for a long time.

All good things need to be upgraded. Back up your critical data and configuration files before you start.

I prefer cold install to upgrades, systems come out cleaner that way.

SEP

[Karsten Riechel]

Thanks alot Steven, very good points.

Technical question leaving for me. I had some problems installing Sarge a few months ago with installing grub (the boot-sector-thing).

When there's no net installer available for Etch, did I have to count with additional problems?

Thanks for your answers.

ric

[Ivan Krastev]

Hi Karsten,

here are network install disks for Etch - http://www.us.debian.org/CD/netinst/index.en.html

regards,
ivan

[Mr Arc]

You can upgrade from sarge to etch.

Change the source.list to etch for upgradation and then execute
#apt-get update.

* Then Execute the command as #apt-get dist-upgrade.

[Matti_Kurkela]

Read the release notes of Etch before starting the upgrade. It contains very detailed instructions for upgrades just like this.

The recommended tool for the upgrades is "aptitude" instead of "apt-get". They are very similar, it is just that "aptitude" has a bit better understanding about the package dependencies.

For example, if you install a package with aptitude, aptitude marks any packages you did not explicitly select but were required to fulfill dependencies as "automatic". If you later remove all packages that required those, it will automatically offer to remove the "automatic" packages too, as it sees they are not needed by anything any more. This helps a lot in keeping the amount of library cruft within manageable limits.

MK

[Karsten Riechel]

Thanks for all your help and hints.

We will work through the documents and try an upgrade to Etch.

I will reply here for lessons learned :)

Thanks alot.