How install squeeze?

[lugoteehalt]

Bit cretinous but how do I safely install squeeze, the testing version of Debian, to replace my Debian Lenny 5 backports current version? Just shove something into apt/sources or whatever it's called and then 'aptitude safe-upgrade' or something?

[tornow]

No need to reinstall.
upgrade the system
edit apt/sources, or however it is called.
install apt and dpkg
upgrade
dist-upgrade

There should be some info at debian.org how to do it properly from one exact version to another exact version (say from lenny to squeeze), but in general it should not be necessary. A short search with a searchengine should make you find them.

[sgosnell]

Change /etc/apt/sources.list, replacing all instances of lenny with squeeze. Then do

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

It's best to do this in a console after closing X, but I've never had a serious problem doing it from the gui. Be prepared for a long upgrade, as a lot of packages will have to be downloaded and installed. It's quicker to download the liveCD and do a new installation, but that can be a hassle if you have a lot of installed packages, and don't have a separate /home partition. Back up your /home in any case, just in case, and make a copy of your installed package list, with

dpkg --get-selections > ~/my-packages

, saving the file my-packages on another drive. If you have to do a reinstall, you can run

sudo dpkg --set-selections < my-packages && sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

afterwards to install all your packages.

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks. I'll post what I do, if it works. Then people can read this f'ing manual.

[tornow]

It's quicker to download the liveCD and do a new installation,

What?
a) what liveCD? cause the unofficial Debian ones might come with an installer (not sure), but it doesn't work (or not proper). And Squeeze is not a CD, but a live-DVD.
b) it sure is not faster.

There might be distros where it is better to go for a re-installation, but Debian is famous for having got easy and reliable upgrades.

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks. I'll post what I do, if it works. Then people can read this f'ing manual.

Total cock up I fear. It won't boot and seems very cocked up.

The problem might be that kept running out of disk space due to it building a .deb file archive presumably in /var. Also the security program 'bastille' had removed permissions for things like dpkg; and this presumably cocked things up - did restore permissions for dpkg but other programs do not have permissions to.

Suspect I should just install squeeze from the first CD??