Blog of Sylvain Le Gall

I spend a whole evening, last week doing this awaited transition. Off course, i only use stable for my "server". This server is an OpenBrick NG, using VIA C3 Nemiah with 2 Fast Ethernet, 1 Gigabit Ethernet and 2 USB 2.0 hard disk. This server is the sensible part of my network. I spend a lot of time configuring all the application of this server and i didn't want to loose all this.

It took me 4 hours to complete the task... The main problem was not with the upgrade -- which was smooth between sarge and etch: just have to replace sarge by etch in my /etc/apt/source.list. It was with the merge after the dist-upgrade and some problems related to udev.

I decided to do a "smart" merge between new configuration files and my old ones. By smart, i mean that it will try to loose the least "new option" used in the maintainer configuration file and try to keep things working as before. For most of the application it was pretty straightforward.

I only encounter a big problem with CUPS. /etc/cuprs/cupsd.conf has changed a lot, so i need to update big parts of it in order to make it work just as before. The next problem, with CUPS, was when i want him to use my printer... It keep telling me that my printer doesn't exist. I have tried to understand for a while, and in particular i was thinking it has something to do with the fact that USB printer now use directly USB id from the printer (which is more powerfull and much more flexible). But the problem was not here. CUPS was unable to find any USB printer, because no device node exist for it, which is a problem of udev running on a too old kernel. Udev was the center of the problem! I didn't notice that during the upgrade, it has issue a warning message concerning the version of my kernel... It was too old, i need to reboot the computer with a newer kernel... For this time, i was forced to reboot my server. But after this all was working well.

The final step of this migration was to get rid of every packages that comes from backports.org or that i build myself based on unstable package. I begin by removing all unwanted source from /etc/apt/sources.list. Then I use "apt-cache dump" and match every files which only are refered from /var/lib/dpkg/available. At the end of the process, i get a list of package which were coming from outside of debian etch.