On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 10:28:57AM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
I've run across someone who says her machine is running Debian oldoldoldstable or maybe even oldoldoldoldstable, and who consequently can't upgrade to newer Debian.
It's easier to say the code name than oldoldoldoldodlodlsdosdld.
I seem to recall that there *is* a way to do step-wise upgrades of such old systems, i.e. upgrading from oldoldoldoldstable to oldoldoldstable, then to oldoldstable, then to oldstable, then to stable. However, I'm stumped as to how to actually get started on doing that.
The order of the releases is documented at https://www.debian.org/releases/
Basically, adjust the sources.list to point to each one in oder, and do the upgrades. Check the release notes for each upgrade to see if special steps are necessary.
The last few steps of this are straightforward; oldoldstable is still available in the repos, as far as I'm aware. The first ones are more of a problem; if I understand matters correctly, anything prior to oldoldstable is removed from the live repos, although its .deb files are still maintained on e.g. snapshot.debian.org. (Which doesn't really suffice for the equivalent of a dist-upgrade, because you'd have to manually download all the correct .debs by hand and then install them with dpkg.)
Use archive.debian.org instead of ftp.debian.org or whatever for very old releases.
Mike Stone
