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Chapter 8

Keeping your Debian system up to date

A Debian goal is to provide a consistent upgrade path and a secure upgrade process. We

always do our best to make upgrading to new releases a smooth procedure. In case there's

some important note to add to the upgrade process, the packages will alert the user, and often

provide a solution to a possible problem.

You should also read the Release Notes, document that describes the details of specific up 

grades, shipped on all Debian CDs, and available on the WWW at

http://www.debian.

org/releases/stable/releasenotes

.

8.1 How can I upgrade my Debian 1.3.1 (or earlier) distribution,

based on libc5, to 2.0 (or later), based on libc6?

There are several ways to upgrade:

  Using a simple shell script called

autoup.sh

which upgrades the most important pack 

ages. After

autoup.sh

has done his job, you may use dselect to install the remaining

packages en masse. This is probably the recommended method, but not the only one.

Currently, the latest release of

autoup.sh

may be found on the following locations:

http://www.debian.org/releases/2.0/autoup/

http://www.taz.net.au/autoup/

http://debian.vicnet.net.au/autoup/

  Following closely the Debian libc5 to libc6 Mini HOWTO (

http://debian.vicnet.

net.au/autoup/HOWTO/libc5 libc6 Mini HOWTO.html

) and upgrade the most

important packages by hand.

autoup.sh

is based on this Mini HOWTO, so this method

should work more or less like using

autoup.sh

.