So, Debian Linux recently moved Lenny to the stable branch. I’ve been running Etch (the “old” stable) on a box for some time now and needed to upgrade to the testing branch (now Squeeze) in order to upgrade Subversion from 1.4 to 1.5. Here’s how I did it. It’s pretty painless.
First, edit /etc/apt/sources.list and make sure all branches point to testing. Here’s a sample of my file:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
Once done, enter the following commands (as root or using sudo):
# aptitude update
# aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
# aptitude full-upgrade
When it was all said and done, the updatedb/locate utilities had been removed, so I had to reinstall those. Otherwise everything was fine. I did all of this remotely and had no issues whatsoever other than my ISP dropping me for 18 hours. But that was solely the result of their incompetence and, since I got to leave work 2 hours early, I’m not complaining.