Upgrade Debian 6.0 Squeeze to 7.0 Wheezy

Spanish version

I've a fresh Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) installation, and have decided to upgrade it to Wheezy (Debian 7.0).

First you need to know that even though in previous versions aptitude has been recommended, in this version apt-get is the recommended command to work with.

You can read (and it is better if you really do it) the full and official instructions here.

But, if your system is not that critical, or if you have somehow a "clean" system. I mean, you have only installed software using the package management tools, you have not manually "tweaked" anything. Then, you can follow this instructions to upgrade from Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) to Debian 7.0 (Wheezy).

First thing you need to do, is backup all important information you may have. I always backup my /home/ folder and the /etc/ folder.

Prepare sources.list

You can use your favorite text editor, to open /etc/apt/sources.list file.

vim /etc/apt/sources.list

And change squeeze for wheezy, it may look like this after the change:

deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ wheezy main
deb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ wheezy main

deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main

As I've told you, my system is very clean.

Upgrade the system

Respecting what the official how-to says, we'll do the upgrade in stages.

Update the sources

apt-get update

Minimal upgrade

apt-get upgrade

Upgrade the Kernel

It seems I already have the 2.6 kernel, but I'm going to follow the instructions anyway.

Here is what I've already have installed.

dpkg -l | grep linux-image

The output is:

ii  linux-image-2.6-amd64                2.6.32+29                      Linux 2.6 for 64-bit PCs (meta-package)
ii  linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64           2.6.32-45                      Linux 2.6.32 for 64-bit PCs

So, upgrading kernel.

apt-get install linux-image-2.6-amd64

Good thing I did, it actually upgraded and added packages.

And because I'm using grub, and I want to be sure everything is going to work.

update-grub

Upgrade udev

apt-get install udev

Final upgrade

Once all these steps have completed, I can now upgrade the distribution so:

apt-get dist-upgrade

I'm now running Debian Wheezy (Testing), I only have to wait for it to be the new stable version of Debian in some more days or few weeks from now.

Some problems

I've run into minor issues, and I had to execute:

apt-get -f install

and then again

apt-get dist-upgrade

After that, everything just worked.