Hi guys. I just got back, and saw there was some question about how /etc/fstab looks after the upgrade.
Here is what happened: I was doing the upgrade in Gnome, using the Gnome GUI terminal. While apt was downloading/installing packages, the terminal suddenly disappeared. Not lock up. Not freeze. Just disappeared completely! Since I had done a Timeshift snapshot just before attempting the upgrade, I just rebooted with a Debian 13 debian-live usb drive I had just made, downloaded Timeshift into the debian-live session, and restored the previous Debian 12 installation from a Timeshift snapshot made just before the upgrade. Then I did the upgrade again. This time it worked, with (almost) no apparent problems. I have had to do Timeshift restores before. As I recall, Timeshift restores the system fine, with one minor exception. Instead of restoring the exact same /etc/fstab file, it insists upon replacing it with a "stripped" version of /etc/fstab, which does NOT include the /mnt entry, and so the /mnt partition is not mounted. And the upgrade process apparently did not do any changes to /etc/fstab. That's why the /etc/fstab after the upgrade looks like that. After the upgrade, the new Debian 13 system did seem to be working okay. Since I had read in the release notes that using a /mnt partition seems to be deprecated in favor of using tmpfs, I inquired about removing the /mnt partition. First, as suggested I did try: "Such files can be accessed using a bind-mount (see mount(1)): running mount --bind / /mnt will make the underlying directory accessible at /mnt/tmp (run umount /mnt once you have cleaned up the old files)." That did not seem to work for me, the files in question just kept re-appearing and would not go away. So I took a deep breath, and re-booted into a debian-live session, downloaded Gparted into it, and used that to: 1) delete the /mnt partition 2) increased the size of the adjacent swap partition to include the freed-up space. Then I re-booted into the new Debian 13 system, and it seems to work. Sorry for the long explanation. --------------------------------------------------------------------- P.S. - maybe I should have just done a fresh install of Debian 13 (perhaps trying out lvm, as suggested). But although a basic installation can be done in an couple of hours, I dread the couple of months it takes to get the application programs, data, and customizations set up properly. P.S.S - next time I will do what I really should have done this time: used Clonezilla to back up the whole drive, so I can do a bare metal reinstall if necessary. But I guess I was just too impatient to try out the new Debian release!
