faded.org

Debian stable just jumped from the previous etch 4 to the new lenny 5. For those looking for an easy upgrade path, there actually isn’t much to it. I ran through an upgrade a short while ago and if you’re interested in the process, here were the steps I followed:

1. Modify /etc/apt/sources.list replacing etch with lenny
2. apt-get update
   
   At this point you may see:

   Reading package lists… Done
   W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:
   4D270D06F42584E6
   W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

   As the output of apt-get update which makes the error message all the more useless. To resolve:

3. apt-get install debian-archive-keyring
4. apt-get update
5. apt-get dist-upgrade
   Then you’ll see something like this:
   

   239 upgraded, 34 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
   Need to get 167MB of archives.
   After unpacking 125MB of additional disk space will be used.
   Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

You might be prompted to allow restart of some services, I just selected the defaults on everything and let it run. A short while later, the upgrade was done, and a shutdown -r now and a minute or so of waiting, a new debian stable lenny install was running happily.