A warning how not to upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze
Hi, I recently upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze. I did the upgrade rather haphazardly without much preplanning and the procedure turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. I acknowledge that Squeeze is not fully released (just frozen), so I understand that there may not be any official upgrade guide yet (and I certainly imagine it would look different to what I attempted). So what follows is *not* a criticism of Debian, but I hope it might serve as a warning to others. :) (Perhaps it may help some technical guys debug the upgrade process, or perhaps it might help someone who is attempting a naive upgrade like I did.) Here's what I did.. I updated /etc/apt/sources.list = s/lenny/squeeze/ I then tried aptitude update aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude. This presented me with a solution that looked too broke for my taste, so I didn't apply it. I then tried aptitude safe-upgrade, this looked sensible so I gave it a shot. This fell over with a few package configuration errors, so I repeatedly tried aptitude safe-upgrade / aptitude full-upgrade in alternate shots. This iterated for a while with different errors each time until eventually I ended up with a system without aptitude installed. I then tried apt-get -f install, several times, which seemed to clear up a lot of things. Eventually my repeated apt-get -f install commands were just giving me the same udev error message. Apparently udev and the kernel need to be updated at the same time, but none of the tools would let me install the new kernel and udev (too many broken packages at the same time I think). I found a magic file that I could touch (/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade) to cause the udev config step to go ahead regardless (even though it knew my kernel wasn't up to it). I then did more rounds of apt-get -f install to clear up some more pending mess. I now had udev but no corresponding kernel to work with it. Now would have been a very bad time to reboot. :) I then manually used apt-get install to ensure that I had the new udev compatible kernel (linux-image-2.6-amd64 in my case).. I then went back to aptitude full-upgrade for a few more iterations, and eventually the system converged with no errors. After a reboot the system was pretty much fine except that X freaked out. I had to just empty the xorg.conf file, and it seems happy again now. Everything else like the new boot scripts, upgrade to grub2, new kernel, etc are working great. -- Paul Richards @pauldoo -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/aanlktinnylyberhshkjmq2bebq5szgud5huadwe5o...@mail.gmail.com
RE: A warning how not to upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze
Original Message I then tried apt-get -f install, several times, which seemed to clear up a lot of things. Eventually my repeated apt-get -f install commands were just giving me the same udev error message. Apparently udev and the kernel need to be updated at the same time, but none of the tools would let me install the new kernel and udev (too many broken packages at the same time I think). This process has worked well for me: == sed -i s/lenny/squeeze/ /etc/apt/sources.list aptitude update aptitude install linux-image-2.6-686 (or amd64, etc.) **reboot** aptitude full-upgrade === I've done it with several headless servers (no X) and it has worked extremely well. You can install the new kernel without installing the new udev, but you can't install the udev without having the new kernel running. I've also done this with three different KDE desktops. On two of the machines it worked very well and KDE was upgraded with everything else. On the third machine aptitude insisted on removing KDE, and I had to re-install it after getting the rest of Squeeze running again. I was not able to figure out what broke KDE on the third desktop. (And I don't use Gnome so can't tell you how that goes.) But essentially to go from Lenny to Squeeze, make sure you get the Squeeze kernel up and running before you try to upgrade anything else and things will go MUCH better. James Z -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4a09477d575c2c4b86497161427dd94c15b0d1f...@city-exchange07
Re: A warning how not to upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze
In aanlktinnylyberhshkjmq2bebq5szgud5huadwe5o...@mail.gmail.com, Paul Richards wrote: Hi, I recently upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze. I did the upgrade rather haphazardly without much preplanning and the procedure turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. You should always read the release notes (available as a WIP now) for the new release and use the upgrade procedure in that document. Here's what I did.. I updated /etc/apt/sources.list = s/lenny/squeeze/ I then tried aptitude update aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude. This presented me with a solution that looked too broke for my taste, so I didn't apply it. You should realize that you don't just have those two choices. Very often, in my mixed stable/backports/testing/unstable/experimental system, interacting with the resolver by only rejecting parts of the solution and then requesting a different solution has been the best way to handle specific package installations. I repeatedly tried aptitude safe-upgrade / aptitude full-upgrade in alternate shots. This iterated for a while with different errors each time until eventually I ended up with a system without aptitude installed. Well, you probably shouldn't have accepted that action. Apparently udev and the kernel need to be updated at the same time, but none of the tools would let me install the new kernel and udev. Well documented in the mailing list archives. I didn't see it last time I read the release notes though. I believe the Squeeze kernel may work with Lenny's udev without error, but not vice-versa. If that's the case, the first step the upgrade procedure will be to upgrade the kernel and reboot, then do a normal upgrade, ending with a second reboot. Thanks for the report. Mine is shorter: I used the heavily mixed system described above and tried (on a whim) the upgrade last night as well. I simply issued (aptitude safe-upgrade -t testing), and it failed to produce *any* upgrade solution, so I'm thinking that aptitude/apt/dpkg might be getting some enhancements during the freeze in order to handle the upgrade. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. b...@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/\_/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: A warning how not to upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze
In 201008261613.03510@iguanasuicide.net, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: Thanks for the report. Mine is shorter: I used the heavily mixed system described above and tried (on a whim) the upgrade last night as well. I simply issued (aptitude safe-upgrade -t testing), and it failed to produce *any* upgrade solution, so I'm thinking that aptitude/apt/dpkg might be getting some enhancements during the freeze in order to handle the upgrade. After upgrading aptitude [stable - testing] and downgrading dpkg [unstable - testing], (aptitude -s safe-upgrade -t testing) now proposes a solution that would result in the majority of my system being upgraded. [920 upgrades; 115 installs; 123 removals; 18 kept back] I'll probably put off the upgrade a while longer, at least until kdepim- runtime-4:4.4.5-1 makes it into testing. Hopefully the Itanium build bug is something that can be fixed quickly. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. b...@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/\_/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: A warning how not to upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze
On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 4:12 PM, Paul Richards paul.richa...@gmail.com wrote:
Everything else like the new boot scripts, upgrade to grub2, new
kernel, etc are working great.
--
Paul Richards
@pauldoo
Don't forget the aptitude purge ~c to clean out all those leftover,
and possibly conflicting, config files and package remains!
dpkg -l | awk '/^rc/ {print $2}' | xargs dpkg -P if you don't have aptitude.
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