Linux Harbour

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.

Debian GNU/Linux becomes our favourite Linux distribution for a year, we like its management system for software packages as known as APT (Advanced Package Tool) very much.

Distribution upgrading

Unlike other rpm-based Linux distributions we tried before, APT provides reliable distribution upgrade, and we did few distro upgrades from Debian/GNU 3.1 to 4.0 (aka Etch). $ apt-get dist-upgrade