apt-get question for debian

[joshdhiner]

Hello, I was just wondering how to upgrade my debian distribution from stable to unstable? Any help would be appreciated.

tnx
Josh

[ColdPack]

Originally posted by joshdhiner:
Hello, I was just wondering how to upgrade my debian distribution from stable to unstable? Any help would be appreciated.

tnx
Josh

Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list to read "unstable" in the appropriate place where currently it likely says "stable".
For example, if it says...

deb ftp://ftp.eecs.umich.edu/debian stable main contrib non-free

you could add the line

deb ftp://ftp.eecs.umich.edu/debian unstable main contrib non-free

...and comment out the previous line with stable (comment it out by placing a "#" if front of the line) or you could simply change the word stable to unstable.

Then run apt-get update then apt-get dist-upgrade and off she'll go!
If I was unclear at all, let me know.

[ 16 February 2001: Message edited by: ColdPack ]

[ 16 February 2001: Message edited by: ColdPack ]

[Craig McPherson]

First of all, I'd recommend that you start out with Testing instead of Unstable. Testing is the same as Unstable, except packages get put into "quarantine" for two weeks before being put into Testing, to make sure they don't manifest any serious bugs.

Anyway, here's the minimal sources.list entry:

deb ftp://ftp.eecs.umich.edu/debian testing main contrib non-free

(I use the umich.edu mirror because it's much faster than the main Debian site -- but use a mirror closer to you if you prefer.)

If you're sure you want to use Unstable instead of Testing, then use "unstable" instead of "testing" in the above line.

Here's a line for non-US packages:

deb-src ftp://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main contrib non-free

If you want a more comprehensive sources.list, check out mine at http://www.bsu-hog.org/sources.list. It's gotten a bit out of date in the past couple weeks, but I'll get back to work on it soon...

[joshdhiner]

Thank you very much. It worked great. Oh, and Ill use testing ;-)

[ColdPack]

Yeah, excellent point, Craig.
I should've suggested that, too, but was being very task-oriented at the moment to answer the exact question. Oh well.
I'll say it anyway... stick with testing instead of unstable!
There.