upgrading between versions using apt

[Aaron Gaudio]

On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 17:07 -0700, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> Is it possible to upgrade between full versions using apt?  For example 
> from FC1 to FC2.  It upgraded most packages, although I had to do a lot 
> of them in small chunks.  But now it's at a stage where it wants to 
> delete a lot of necessary packages, including both installed kernels. 
> I've tried this on several computers and on the one I really needed to 
> be fully operational, I gave up and used the cd's to do a proper upgrade 
> which worked just fine.  What does the installer do that just upgrading 
> the packages using apt can not do?

I've used apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade from RH9 to FC1, to FC2 and
now to FC3 test. In each case (especially RH9 to FC1) I've had to work
on stuff myself to get the system fully up and ready. Unless you have
quite a bit of experience (or are a fast user) I'd recommend using the
CDs. At the mininimum, you'll probably need to 'apt-get install'
individual packages that for one reason or another apt decided it needed
to remove (though for FC1->FC2 there should not be many of these).

One relatively simple tip: if your /var partition is not big enough for
apt to download everything into, just symlink /var/cache/apt/archives to
another partition that is large enough.

-- 
Aaron Gaudio <prothonotar at tarnation.dyndns.org>