This Sunday, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 codenamed ‘Etch’ was released as the next stable release of Debian. Therefore, both the servers where this site is hosted on have been upgraded to the latest version.

Although not as easy as just running ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’, the upgrade went very smooth. I just had to follow the release notes and after a reboot both servers ran the newly released version fine. Well, actually one server did not came up right away but that had nothing to do with the upgrade. A manual file system check was needed. Thanks to the quick support from the techies at serverpronto, the server was back up within the hour.

If it takes as long as it took Etch to become a stable release, the next major upgrade will be somewhere 22 months from now.

For those interested, these were the steps taken to upgrade from Debian 3.1 (sarge) to Debian 4.0 (etch):

• aptitude update
• aptitude -y -s -f –with-recommends dist-upgrade
• aptitude upgrade
• aptitude install initrd-tools
• aptitude install linux-image-2.6-686
• aptitude dist-upgrade
• aptitude update
• reran ‘aptitude upgrade’ and ‘aptitude dist-upgrade’ until no packages were kept back and nothing remained to be done.
• reboot
• removed obsolete packages from old sarge.
• recompiled home-built soft. (This was not really necessary but I liked to have the soft compiled with the new gcc4)

If, for some reason, you would like to know more about the steps taken, just drop me an email.