From Squeeze to Wheezy like a breeze!!!

Upgrading Debian 6.0 to 7.0

With the release of Debian 7.0 there are two ways that you can have this distribution installed on your VPS or Dedicated servers.

One is the clean installation, this could be done using our customer control panel. This is a complete re-installation, so you will loose all your data. This method is recommended as it will freshly install a clean distribution.

But if your system is not that critical, or if you have somehow a ‘clean’ system, which means that you have installed software only using package management tools, you have not manually ‘tweaked’ anything or if you have not installed any additional software using .tar, then you can proceed with the following instructions to upgrade from Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) to Debian 7.0 (Wheeze).

Before we begin a word of caution :  Though we have tested this on a test server here at our Contabo labs, and everything seem to work without any problem, we highly recommend you to create a backup and store it remotely before you begin, just in case.

Complete official instruction to upgrade can be found here.

Bringing your current Debian 6 up-to-date:

Before beginning it is a good idea to ensure your current release is up to date. You can do it using the following commands:

Update and Upgrade

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

Changing sources.list

Please open your favorite text editor to open /etc/apt/sources.list file

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

and change squeeze to wheezy, after the change my /etc/apt/sources.list file looks like this :

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy main non-free contrib
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy-updates main contrib non-free

Upgrade the System

We follow the upgrade process in the following sequence according to the official how-to.

Update the sources

apt-get update

Minimal upgrade

apt-get upgrade

Upgrade the kernel
You can check the current installed version of your kernel using the following command :

dpkg -l | grep linux-image

my output was:

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

Upgrading kernel :

apt-get install linux-image-2.6-amd64

next step would be to update grub to be sure that everything works as expected:

update-grub

update udev

apt-get install udev

Final upgrade:

After all the above steps have been completed, we can upgrade the distribution:

apt-get dist-upgrade

Here you go – have fun with your new Debian 7.0 – you can check your version:

cat /etc/issue

Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 \n \l