[Q] Upgrade Debian 5.0.8 to 6.0.0 on rev C4?

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1

I haven't been part of this list for a while and my Beagleboard has
been running Lenny happily for a long time now. I want to make to
jump to squeeze and tried the usual "apt-get dist-upgrade" but that
didn't do anything.

Additionally I haven't found any discussions/how to's on doing this
specifically for Beagleboard (or ARM in general) via my google
searches.

Is there a viable procedure to upgrade to squeeze from lenny on the
Beagleboard?

Alternately am I better off just doing a fresh load of squeeze and
porting all my software & customizations one by one? (This is the
route I'm trying to avoid since I usually access my Beagleboard
remotely and swapping SD cards is not an option in that scenario)

Any and all suggestions & links to how to's would be greatly
appreciated.

Some information about my board & OS:

Debian Version : 5.0.8
Beagleboard : Revision C4
U-Boot Version :
Kernel Version : Linux beagleboard 2.6.34.4-x2 #1 PREEMPT Sat Aug 14
02:57:06 UTC 2010 armv7l GNU/Linux
dmesg : http://pastebin.com/EYLiWgsw

...
Don

2

Hi Don,

First upgrade to the atleast the last 2.6.35.x series for lenny:

wget http://rcn-ee.net/deb/lenny/v2.6.35.9-x9/install-me.sh
/bin/bash install-me.sh

Reboot, then.. change "lenny -> squeeze" in your /etc/apt/sources.list

Something like: (noted the "distro-updates" change from lenny for updates)

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main

then, this should do it;

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apt aptitude udev
(possible reboot, but the 2.6.35.x kernel should be fine with out..)
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
then maybe a
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade (but double check the packages it want's to install)

Regards

3

Robert – thank you for your input.

I am pleased to report I have successfully upgraded my Debian Beagleboard.

I followed the pre-upgrade step from this [1] article which talks about updating and cleaning up packages before upgrading. I did have a couple dozen orphaned packages so this was definitely a worthwhile exercise.

Secondly I followed Robert advice but I ran into some trouble with “aptitude safe-upgrade”. I ran it twice and both times it just ran the CPU at 100% and consumed all the memory, then started swapping. It never completed the “Resolving dependencies” stage. So I went with aptitude dist-upgrade and it only needed to remove the sysvconfig package so I felt confident proceeding in this manner.

Third, I added to Robert recommendations by picking up the latest stable squeeze kernel.

And lastly, I [2] blogged it for reference (mostly mine since I’ll forget what I did in a couple of months).

[1] http://www.howtoforge.com/upgrade-debian-lenny-to-squeeze-in-a-few-simple-steps

[2] http://www.jeremycole.com/blog/2011/03/09/beagleboard-upgrading-from-debian-5-to-debian-6/

4

Robert – thank you for your input.

I am pleased to report I have successfully upgraded my Debian Beagleboard.

I referenced your blog post here http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardDebian#Upgrading_from_Debian_5_to_Debian_6

If you have an elinux.org username, you can let me know or add it to the link yourself if you like.