This post will show how to upgrade from Debian 5.0.x “Lenny” to the latest stable Debian release 6.0 “Squeeze”. One of the reasons I’ve liked Debian in the first place was the advantage of being able to do a live, in place updates from one major release to another, usually in a safe way. As always, if you do this, please take some time to backup your system if you care of your data, as this is a major upgrade and things can go wrong. Squeeze brings in a few big changes and I will outline some of them, but I would recommend to read the release notes and look for any incompatibilities (hardware or software) or changed things that could affect your particular setup.

1. Update apt sources.list

The first thing we will do (after the backup of course) is to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and replace “lenny” with “squeeze“. Originally, this might look like this (for a system using the main US mirrors; your file might use a different local one):

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates lenny contrib non-free

after replacing lenny with squeeze the file will look like this:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free

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During the annual Debian Developer Conference “Debconf10” in New York, the Debian’s release managers have announced the freeze of the upcoming stable release Debian 6.0 Squeeze. Basically this means that no new features will be added and all work will now be concentrated on fixing existing bugs.

The upcoming debian stable release will include:
- Linux 2.6.32 kernel
- Apache 2.2.16, PHP 5.3.2, MySQL 5.1.48, PostgreSQL 8.4.4
- Python 2.6 and 3.1, Perl 5.10, Ruby 1.8.7.299 and 1.9.2~svn28788, GCC 4.4
- DKMS, a framework to generate Linux kernel modules whose sources do not reside in the Linux kernel source tree.
- Dependency-based ordering of init scripts using insserv, allowing parallel execution to shorten the time needed to boot the system.

Hopefully we will see Squeeze going stable in the next 4-6 months, ideally by the end of the year!

Release Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806