On Tue, 28 Nov 2017 10:28:57 -0500 The Wanderer <wande...@fastmail.fm> 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. > > 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 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.) > > Is there in fact a way to manage the first steps of this stepwise > upgrade, from one aged-out-of-the-repos release to another? > > If so, any pointers to information on how to go about it? Save yourself time and lots of problems, back up your data and do a clean install of the current Debian release. To do what you want requires dist-upgrading each release, in order, one-at-a-time, then troubleshooting each dist-upgrade once done with no guarantees it will work. Be sure to read and explicitly follow the dist-upgrade instructions in the Release Notes for each release. Many times there are special things that must be done. Just dist-upgrading from your current old install to Stretch, skipping all those inbetween is "not recommended," meaning it won't work. Good Luck B
