Upgrading from Debian Etch to Lenny

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (Lenny) becomes stable version on Valentine Day. We upgraded old stable 4.0 Etch server remotely and successfully.

Summary of upgrading procedures:

1. Update list of apt sources to Lenny release.
2. Use aptitude to update local list of available packages.
3. Use aptitude to upgrade apt, dpkg and aptitude first.
4. Use UUID insteads of old IDE device names to identify root filesystem for grub and filesystem table.
5. Use aptitude to do full upgrade.
6. Reboot the system.
7. Use aptitude to do package upgrades if any.

Update list of apt sources to Lenny release.

# vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Replace all 'etch' to 'lenny'.

Use aptitude to update local list of available packages

# aptitude update
# aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude

Use UUID insteads of old IDE device names to identify root filesystem for grub and filesystem table.

UUID of root filesystem can be found at /dev/disk/by-uuid directory.

# ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

Identify which root filesystem to be loaded at grub config.

# grep kopt /boot/grub/menu.lst

Editing grub configuration /etc/grub/menu.lst for UUID of rootfs.

From sth. like:

# kopt=root=/dev/hda3 ro

To sth. like:

# kopt=root=UUID=203d2285-2a7d-44a3-a254-552ed139e351 ro

and then run Debian's grub update program.

# update-grub

Next, editing filesystem table /etc/fstab for UUID of rootfs.

From sth. like:

/dev/hda3     /     ext3  defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1

To sth. like:

UUID=d0dfcc8a-417a-41e3-ad2e-9736317f2d8  /  ext3  defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1

Use aptitude to do full upgrade

# aptitude full-upgrade

Reboot your system after first full upgrade. And run aptitude again to upgrade other packages if any.