Debian: From 6 to 7

Debian did release its Version 7 - named after the cuddly Penguin of the movie ToyStory, Wheezy. Time to update? Sure - painless as usual: Backup (did I already mention that I love vmware snapshots?) first, followed by a traditional update to have it all set before doing the real update:

apt-get update apt-get upgrade

If there are packages kept back, remember, there’s “apt-get dist-upgrade”. The next step is modifying the sources.list: Replace ‘squeeze’ with ‘wheezy’. That’s how mine looks like after the changes:

deb wheezy main contrib non-free deb-src wheezy main contrib non-free

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

wheezy-updates, previously known as ‘volatile’

deb wheezy-updates main contrib non-free deb-src wheezy-updates main contrib non-free

Next step - Updating as usual:

apt-get update apt-get upgrade

apt-get update is needed to fetch the new sources. Next step: getting the kernel done. In my case, I am using a 64 bit system, so I’d use the matching kernel:

apt-get install linux-image-2.6-amd64

Better safe than sorry: doing an udev upgrade before should prevent most breakage there. Then, the kept back packages:

apt-get install udev apt-get dist-upgrade

In my case, I had to rebuild the vmware modules due to the new kernel - an update-grup finalizes it all and we’re ready to reboot, keeping our fingers crossed. After the reboot, a short gance into the syslog:

cat /var/log/syslog

That’s all, folks.