[clug] Advice request on upgrade to Debian Squeeze local mirrors?

[Scott Ferguson]

On Sun, 20 Mar 2011 21:49:14 +0000 (UTC) Felix Karpfen wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 19 Mar 2011 10:31:38 +1100, Scott Ferguson wrote:
> 
>> > Please post your experiences.
> Crashed within sight of the finishing post!!
> 
> Everything appeared to work!


Suggestions for future reference:-
#apt-get -s upgrade | more
then:-
#apt-get -s upgrade > /root/upgrade (in case suggestions solves later
problems)
Same thing for dist-upgrade
> 
> "apt-get upgrade" found what it needed on the first 4 of the 8 DVDs and 
> ran to completion without problems;
> 
> Installing the new kernel, etc. worked.
> 
> The reboot worked.
> 
> "apt-get dist-upgrade" worked OK until I ceased to watch it and took a 
> break (from watching).  I thought that stopping at the point where I was 
> asked to insert my second DVD was safe. 
> 
> It was not.  When I came back from my break, I could not open the CD-
> drive to insert the next DVD.

dmesg? logs?

> 
> Total disaster.  It appears that you cannot interrupt the "dist-upgrade" 
> and come back later. 

You can (Ctrl+Z, and you can continue from a crash) - though you'll have
to remove the lock file before you can continue, this has happened to me
many times doing the same using the internet instead of DVDs.
(3"spit"Mobile Wireless Broadband)

*Note: I vaguely remember needing to check the integrity of every
DVD/CD/Floppy before install/upgrade/dist-upgrade from non-network mediums.

If drive space allows:-
#apt-get -d dist-upgrade
"might" help

> 
> Back to Square One.  Lucky that my Debian Lenny still boots!
> 
> Felix
> 
> 
> 

If I were you I'd go the parallel or virtualbox route first, your
problems could be many things - my one coffee guess would be either:-
;dodgy DVD
;no upgrade path for one or more of your Lenny packages

Sometimes exactly the same upgrade path works with aptitude where it
didn't work with apt. Having never bothered to learn the aptitude
incantations I can't speak from first hand experience..

Does:-
#apt-get -sf install
give anything useful?

Suggest you try something like:-

dpkg --get-selections > /root/current_packages
use the output as a reference, hopefully you already did this before
beginning the upgrade.

"expert" install selecting only base system at tasksel
Perhaps followed by "a trim and a bit of a tidy":-
purge exim4*, replace wamerican with wbritish, add purgelocale deborphan
mc zip unzip rar etc, remove nfs-common if you don't use it.

Then:-
#apt-get -s install gdm(3) jwm | more
check to see if xorg is included, add if necessary

then:-
#apt-get install whatever_applications_and_utilities_desired

Note: your choice of lilo may save you some of the complaints some have
had with grub(2).

Note also my earlier suggestion about debian-user mailing list:-
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/ (if you intend to subscribe I
suggest a dedicated email account, it's a high volume list)
While I know there are some Debian gurus lurking on this list (even the
odd core developer) - you are more likely to find someone with a similar
setup on the debian-user list.