Comments on Upgrade Debian Lenny To Squeeze In A Few Simple Steps

The official release notes are where Debian publishes it's upgrade instructions. Publishing an abbreviated version is fine, but why no mention of the release notes? They contain much information as to how to avoid problems up-front and what to do about problems should they arise.

When Debian upgrades it does not automatically change any configuration files that have been manually changed. You are given the option to install the new config files, keep the old, or have various options for resolving the differences. Or you can go back and resolve the differences after upgrade. So upgrading will not "break your email system".

If you do not upgrade postfix you should not upgrade the rest of your system. All the packages in a release are designed to work together. Mixing packages from various releases is a recipe for a broken system.

(Likewise, adding non-Debian software to a Debian system puts you in a position of being your own system's integrator. Things will break, especially on upgrade, and you'll need to be able to fix them yourself -- as well as keep up with any security patches. Better to let the Debian team make sure that your software works together. Those unfamiliar with Debian often do not know that there is much software for Debian stable that is not available in the default install, but that is easily enabled.)

What is this article for when there are such nice official Release Notes including the procedure described here and much more important stuff to be aware of!

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/releasenotes

Thanks for the tip.

I have found that it works best, after you change the sources list and do the update, to run "apt-get dist-upgrade -d" to make sure that you have all of the packages locally before installing anything.   It really helps if a couple of things don't play well together, and break the network halfway through, just to fix it at the end (like the network scripts being incompatible with the kernel.)

Having followed your Perfect setup for etch including changing postfix to use mysql for everything and then upgrading to lenny I was able to leave postfix in its held state for the fixes.

 This upgrade says 'nothing can be held'. I hope I can still leave postfix held or my mail system will no longer work.

The guide describes how to install the old debian lenny kernel but debian release notes describes it differently (and actually install the squeeze kernel 2.6.32-5). It should be: apt-get install linux-image-2.6-variant where variant is the processor type. So for your laptop it should have been: apt-get install linux-image-2.6-686

You got an error in there. The file is not named

 /etc/apt/source.list

 but 

 /etc/apt/sources.list.

If yours is indeed named  "/etc/apt/sources.list.", then you better rename it to remove the trailing dot...

The question is on the 's', not the trailing '.'

 /etc/apt/sources.list

If you may be running a slightly out-of-date kernel you *will* need to update the kernel first in Lenny prior to this upgrade to Squeeze. It will fail otherwise with broken sub-process'. Also make sure you have your firmware drivers in /lib/firmware if nonfree. You should get some warnings for missing firmware after the squeeze kernel upgrade. I had issues with Broadcom network drivers and if I restarted that would be the whole upgrade up in smoke for a while... J.

I want to thank you for the awesome job you did putting this together!  Yes as some have said you left out lots of information which could have been helpful, if things went south.  But on the other hand you provided enough information to perform a successful upgrade.

I am an IT pro, but only use Linux on my home system.  So I'm nowhere near as proficient as I would like.  I am constantly frustrated when I run into a problem, look for assistance online, and find the "any dummy would know how to..." responses, but with no helpful information.  Linux moves fast, and "how to" books are outdated very quickly.  So I appreciated your no-nonsense "how to" guide.

Fwiw I am just about finished performing a remote (ssh) upgrade of my home system.  Base system upgrade went well (I followed all of your precautions), rebooted, and am now in the "Full Upgrade" phase.

-bk

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian-security/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free

deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian-security/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main

deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main

I used your HOWTO up to the point to upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze on my cca 8 year old Toshiba Satellite and it worked all perfectly! I remember it was similar to upgrade from Etch to Lenny, but that time I had a lot of pain to set up correctly my screen resolution. Now everything is fine and even sound and pictures work better than in Lenny. Thank you!

 The essence is at the bottom - do a 

 apt-get install mysql-server-5.1

 and you should be fine already, no need to fuss with mysql_upgrade etc.

Upgrading is usually hard to follow and error prone. This worked perfectly! Nice work.

not work..

deb http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-freedeb-src http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free