Release Notes for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (squeeze), IA-64
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The Debian Documentation Project (http://www.debian.org/doc/)
This document is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License,
version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
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along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
02110-1301 USA.
The license text can also be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses
/gpl-2.0.html (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html) and /usr
/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 on Debian GNU/Linux.
February 4th, 2011
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. Reporting bugs on this document
1.2. Contributing upgrade reports
1.3. Sources for this document
2. What's new in Debian GNU/Linux 6.0
2.1. What's new in the distribution?
2.1.1. CDs, DVDs and BDs
2.1.2. Firmware moved to the non-free section
2.1.3. Package management
2.1.4. Dependency booting
2.1.5. Unified keyboard settings
2.1.6. Kernel mode setting
2.1.7. LDAP support
2.1.8. The stable-updates section
2.1.9. backports.org/backports.debian.org
2.2. Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
3. Installation System
3.1. What's new in the installation system?
3.1.1. Major changes
3.1.2. Automated installation
4. Upgrades from Debian 5.0 (lenny)
4.1. Preparing for the upgrade
4.1.1. Back up any data or configuration information
4.1.2. Inform users in advance
4.1.3. Prepare for downtime on services
4.1.4. Prepare for recovery
4.1.5. Prepare a safe environment for the upgrade
4.1.6. Remove conflicting packages
4.2. Checking system status
4.2.1. Review actions pending in package manager
4.2.2. Disabling APT pinning
4.2.3. Checking packages status
4.2.4. The proposed-updates section
4.2.5. Unofficial sources and backports
4.3. Preparing sources for APT
4.3.1. Adding APT Internet sources
4.3.2. Adding APT sources for a local mirror
4.3.3. Adding APT source from CD-ROM or DVD
4.4. Upgrading packages
4.4.1. Recording the session
4.4.2. Updating the package list
4.4.3. Make sure you have sufficient space for the upgrade
4.4.4. Minimal system upgrade
4.4.5. Upgrading the kernel and udev
4.4.6. Upgrading the system
4.5. Possible issues during upgrade
4.5.1. cryptoloop support not included in the squeeze Linux
kernel
4.5.2. Expected removals
4.5.3. Errors running aptitude or apt-get
4.5.4. Conflicts or Pre-Depends loops
4.5.5. File conflicts
4.5.6. Configuration changes
4.5.7. Change of session to console
4.5.8. Special care for specific packages
4.6. Upgrading your kernel and related packages
4.6.1. Installing the kernel metapackage
4.6.2. Device enumeration reordering
4.6.3. Boot timing issues (waiting for root device)
4.7. Preparing for the next release
4.8. Deprecated components
4.9. Obsolete packages
4.9.1. Dummy packages
5. Issues to be aware of for squeeze
5.1. Potential problems
5.1.1. Migration of disk drivers from IDE to PATA subsystem
5.1.2. mdadm metadata format change requires recent Grub
5.1.3. pam_userdb.so breakage with newer libdb
5.1.4. Potential issues with diversions of /bin/sh
5.1.5. Change in kernel policy regarding resource conflicts
5.2. LDAP support
5.3. sieve service moving to its IANA-allocated port
5.4. Security status of web browsers
5.5. KDE desktop
5.5.1. Upgrading from KDE 3
5.5.2. New KDE metapackages
5.6. GNOME desktop changes and support
5.6.1. GDM 2.20 and 2.30
5.6.2. Device and other administrative permissions
5.6.3. network-manager and ifupdown interaction
5.7. Graphics stack changes
5.7.1. Obsolete Xorg drivers
5.7.2. Kernel mode setting
5.7.3. Input device hotplug
5.7.4. X server “zapping”
5.8. Munin web path change
5.9. Shorewall upgrade instructions
6. More information on Debian GNU/Linux
6.1. Further reading
6.2. Getting help
6.2.1. Mailing lists
6.2.2. Internet Relay Chat
6.3. Reporting bugs
6.4. Contributing to Debian
A. Managing your lenny system before the upgrade
A.1. Upgrading your lenny system
A.2. Checking your sources list
A.3. Upgrade legacy locales to UTF-8
B. Contributors to the Release Notes
Index
Glossary
Chapter 1. Introduction
This document informs users of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution
about major changes in version 6.0 (codenamed squeeze).
The release notes provide information on how to upgrade safely
from release 5.0 (codenamed lenny) to the current release and
inform users of known potential issues they could encounter in
that process.
You can get the most recent version of this document from http://
www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/releasenotes (http://
www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/releasenotes) . If in doubt,
check the date on the first page to make sure you are reading a
current version.
Caution
Note that it is impossible to list every known issue and that
therefore a selection has been made based on a combination of the
expected prevalence and impact of issues.
Please note that we only support and document upgrading from the
previous release of Debian (in this case, the upgrade from 5.0).
If you need to upgrade from older releases, we suggest you read
previous editions of the release notes and upgrade to 5.0 first.
1.1. Reporting bugs on this document
We have attempted to test all the different upgrade steps
described in this document and to anticipate all the possible
issues our users might encounter.
Nevertheless, if you think you have found a bug (incorrect
information or information that is missing) in this
documentation, please file a bug in the bug tracking system
(http://bugs.debian.org/) against the release-notes package. You
might want to review first the existing bug reports (http://
bugs.debian.org/release-notes) in case the issue you've found has
already been reported. Feel free to add additional information to
existing bug reports if you can contribute content for this
document.
We appreciate, and encourage, reports providing patches to the
document's sources. You will find more information describing how
to obtain the sources of this document in Section 1.3, “Sources
for this document”.
1.2. Contributing upgrade reports
We welcome any information from users related to upgrades from
lenny to squeeze. If you are willing to share information please
file a bug in the bug tracking system (http://bugs.debian.org/)
against the upgrade-reports package with your results. We request
that you compress any attachments that are included (using gzip).
Please include the following information when submitting your
upgrade report:
* The status of your package database before and after the
upgrade: dpkg's status database available at /var/lib/dpkg/
status and apt's package state information, available at /var
/lib/apt/extended_states. You should have made a backup
before the upgrade as described at Section 4.1.1, “Back up
any data or configuration information”, but you can also find
backups of /var/lib/dpkg/status in /var/backups.
* Session logs created using script, as described in
Section 4.4.1, “Recording the session”.
* Your apt logs, available at /var/log/apt/term.log or your
aptitude logs, available at /var/log/aptitude.
Note
You should take some time to review and remove any sensitive and/
or confidential information from the logs before including them
in a bug report as the information will be published in a public
database.
1.3. Sources for this document
The source of this document is in DocBook XML format. The HTML
version is generated using docbook-xsl and xsltproc. The PDF
version is generated using dblatex or xmlroff. Sources for the
Release Notes are available in the SVN repository of the Debian
Documentation Project. You can use the web interface (http://
svn.debian.org/viewsvn/ddp/manuals/trunk/release-notes/) to
access its files individually through the web and see their
changes. For more information on how to access the SVN please
consult the Debian Documentation Project SVN information pages
(http://www.debian.org/doc/cvs) .
Chapter 2. What's new in Debian GNU/Linux 6.0
The Wiki (http://wiki.debian.org/NewInSqueeze) has more
information about this topic.
This release drops official support for the HP PA-RISC ('hppa')
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/09/
msg00008.html) , Alpha ('alpha') and ARM ('arm') architectures.
The following are the officially supported architectures for
Debian GNU/Linux squeeze:
* 32-bit PC ('i386')
* SPARC ('sparc')
* PowerPC ('powerpc')
* MIPS ('mips' (big-endian) and 'mipsel' (little-endian))
* Intel Itanium ('ia64')
* S/390 ('s390')
* 64-bit PC ('amd64')
* ARM EABI ('armel')
In addition to the officially supported architectures, Debian GNU
/Linux squeeze introduces the GNU/kFreeBSD ports
('kfreebsd-amd64' and 'kfreebsd-i386') as a technology preview.
These ports are the first ones included in a Debian release which
aren't based on the Linux kernel, but instead use the FreeBSD
kernel with a GNU userland. Users of these versions however
should be warned that the quality of these ports is still
catching up with the outstanding high quality of our Linux ports,
and that some advanced desktop features are not supported yet.
However, the support of common server software is strong and
extends the features of Linux-based Debian versions by the unique
features known from the BSD world. This is the first time a Linux
distribution has been extended to also allow use of a non-Linux
kernel.
You can read more about port status, and port-specific
information for your architecture at the Debian port web pages
(http://www.debian.org/ports/) .
2.1. What's new in the distribution?
This new release of Debian again comes with a lot more software
than its predecessor lenny; the distribution includes over 10352
new packages, for a total of over 29050 packages. Most of the
software in the distribution has been updated: over 15436
software packages (this is 67% of all packages in lenny). Also, a
significant number of packages (over 4238, 18% of the packages in
lenny) have for various reasons been removed from the
distribution. You will not see any updates for these packages and
they will be marked as 'obsolete' in package management
front-ends.
With this release, Debian GNU/Linux updates from X.Org 7.3 to
X.Org 7.5.
Debian GNU/Linux again ships with several desktop applications
and environments. Among others it now includes the desktop
environments GNOME 2.30^[1], KDE 4.4.5, Xfce 4.6.2, and LXDE
0.5.0. Productivity applications have also been upgraded,
including the office suites OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 and KOffice
2.2.1 as well as GNUcash 2.2.9, GNUmeric 1.10.8 and Abiword
2.8.2.
Updates of other desktop applications include the upgrade to
Evolution 2.30.3 and Pidgin 2.7.3. The Mozilla suite has also
been updated: iceweasel (version 3.5.13) is the unbranded Firefox
web browser and icedove (version 3.0.7) is the unbranded
Thunderbird mail client.
Among many others, this release also includes the following
software updates:
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Package |Version in 5.0 | Version in 6.0 |
| | (lenny) | (squeeze) |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Apache |2.2.9 |2.2.16 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|BIND DNS Server |9.6.0 |9.7.1 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Cherokee web server |0.7.2 |1.0.8 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Courier MTA |0.60.0 |0.63.0 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Dia |0.96.1 |0.97.1 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Ekiga VoIP Client |2.0.12 |3.2.7 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Exim default email server |4.69 |4.72 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|GNU Compiler Collection as |4.3.2 |4.4.5 |
|default compiler | | |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|GIMP |2.4.7 |2.6.10 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|the GNU C library |2.7 |2.11.2 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|lighttpd |1.4.19 |1.4.28 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|maradns |1.3.07.09 |1.4.03 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|MySQL |5.0.51a |5.1.49 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|OpenLDAP |2.4.11 |2.4.23 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|OpenSSH |5.1p1 |5.5p1 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|PHP |5.2.6 |5.3.2 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Postfix MTA |2.5.5 |2.7.1 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|PostgreSQL |8.3.5 |8.4.5 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Python |2.5.2 |2.6.6 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Samba |3.2.5 |3.5.5 |
|------------------------------+---------------+----------------|
|Tomcat |5.5.26 |6.0.28 |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
Debian still supports Linux Standard Base (LSB) version 3.2.
2.1.1. CDs, DVDs and BDs
The official Debian GNU/Linux distribution now ships on 7 to 8
binary DVDs or 44 to 53 binary CDs (depending on the
architecture) and 6 source DVDs or 33 source CDs. Additionally,
there is a multi-arch DVD, with a subset of the release for the
amd64 and i386 architectures, along with the source code. Debian
GNU/Linux is also released as Blu-ray (BD) images, 2 each for the
amd64 and i386 architectures, or one for the source code. For
size reasons, some very large packages are omitted from the CD
builds; these packages fit better in the DVD and BD builds, so
are still included there.
A new feature with squeeze is the addition of isohybrid support
to the i386 and amd64 CDs, DVDs and BDs. To make a USB stick
bootable with one of these images used to mean following some
extra procedures after downloading the image; instead, now all
that is required is to simply write the image directly to the USB
stick. For more information please see the “Preparing Files for
USB Memory Stick Booting” section in the Installation Guide
(http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual) .
2.1.2. Firmware moved to the non-free section
Some drivers included in the Linux kernel used to contain
non-free firmware blobs. Starting from squeeze this firmware has
been moved to separate packages in the non-free section of the
archive, such as firmware-linux. If such packages are installed,
the firmware will be loaded automatically when required.
2.1.3. Package management
The preferred program for interactive package management from a
terminal is aptitude. For a non-interactive command line
interface for package management, it is recommended to use
apt-get. apt-get is also the preferred tool for upgrades between
major releases. If you are still using dselect, you should switch
to aptitude as the official front-end for package management.
For squeeze APT automatically installs recommended packages by
default^[2]. This can be changed by adding the following line in
/etc/apt/apt.conf:
APT::Install-Recommends "false";
2.1.4. Dependency booting
An important improvement in the Debian GNU/Linux boot system is
the introduction of dependency-based boot sequencing and parallel
boot. This feature is enabled by default in new installs and it
will be enabled for upgrades from lenny, if possible.
This feature is enabled through the use of insserv by sysv-rc to
order init.d scripts based on their declared dependencies^[3]. It
has been possible after a sustained effort to adapt all the boot
scripts of packages provided in the distribution as well as the
boot system itself.
With dependency-based boot sequencing it is also now possible to
run the boot system scripts in parallel which can, under most
circumstances, improve the speed of the boot process. This
feature is enabled by default, in new systems and upgrades,
whenever possible. To disable it specify
CONCURRENCY=none
in /etc/default/rcS. For more information on this feature refer
to the information available in /usr/share/doc/insserv/
README.Debian.
2.1.5. Unified keyboard settings
In this new release, the settings for the keyboard have been
unified so that both the console and the Xorg server use the same
settings. The keyboard settings are now defined in the /etc/
default/keyboard configuration file which overrides the keyboard
defined in Xorg's configuration file.
The console-setup package now handles the keyboard for both
environments as well as the font configuration for the console.
You can reconfigure the keyboard layout and related settings by
executing dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration or by manually
editing the /etc/default/keyboard configuration file.
2.1.6. Kernel mode setting
Graphics mode setting code for the most common desktop chipsets
(from Intel, ATI/AMD and NVIDIA) has moved from the respective
Xorg drivers to the Linux kernel. This provides a number of
advantages, such as:
* More reliable suspend and resume
* Ability to use graphics devices without X
* Faster VT switch
* Native mode text console
More details are in Section 5.7, “Graphics stack changes” and in
the Debian wiki (http://wiki.debian.org/KernelModesetting) .
2.1.7. LDAP support
This Debian release comes with several options for implementing
client-side authentication using LDAP. Users of the libnss-ldap
and libpam-ldap packages should consider upgrading to
libnss-ldapd and libpam-ldapd.
These newer packages delegate the LDAP queries to a central
unprivileged daemon (nslcd) that provides separation between the
process using the LDAP information and the daemon performing LDAP
queries. This simplifies handling of secured LDAP connections,
LDAP authentication credentials, provides a simpler mechanism to
perform connection fail-over and debugging and avoids loading
LDAP and related libraries into most applications.
Upgrading to libnss-ldapd and libpam-ldapd should be easy as
existing configuration information will be mostly reused. Only
for advanced configuration should any manual reconfiguration be
necessary.
These packages however currently lack support for nested groups
and only support password change using the LDAP password modify
EXOP operation.
2.1.8. The stable-updates section
Some packages from proposed-updates may also be made available
via the squeeze-updates mechanism. This path will be used for
updates which many users may wish to install on their systems
before the next point release is made, such as updates to virus
scanners and timezone data. All packages from squeeze-updates
will be included in point releases.
Note that this replaces the functionality previously provided by
the volatile.debian.org archive (http://volatile.debian.org/) .
In order to use packages from squeeze-updates, you can add an
entry to your sources.list:
deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian squeeze-updates main contrib
deb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian squeeze-updates main contrib
The next time you run apt-get update, the system will become
aware of the packages in the squeeze-updates section and will
consider them when looking for packages to upgrade.
Note that if APT::Default-Release is set in your /etc/apt/
apt.conf (or in any of /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/*), then, in order for
automatic upgrades to work, it is necessary to add the following
configuration block into /etc/apt/preferences (see
apt_preferences(5) for more information):
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian GNU/Linux,n=squeeze-updates
Pin-Priority: 990
When a new package is made available via squeeze-updates, this
will be announced on the debian-stable-announce (http://
lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/) mailing list.
2.1.9. backports.org/backports.debian.org
The service provided by the backports.org repositories has been
integrated in Debian infrastructure and is now an official Debian
service (http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100905) , hosted at
backports.debian.org (http://backports.debian.org/) .
2.2. Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 is the first GNU/Linux distribution release
ever to offer comprehensive support for magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) based neuroimaging research. It comes with
up-to-date software for structural image analysis (e.g. ants),
diffusion imaging and tractography (e.g. mrtrix), stimulus
delivery (e.g. psychopy), MRI sequence development (e.g. odin),
as well as a number of versatile data processing and analysis
suites (e.g. nipype). Moreover, this release has built-in support
for all major neuroimaging data formats. See the Debian Science
(http://blends.alioth.debian.org/science/tasks/
neuroscience-cognitive) and Debian Med (http://
debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/imaging) task pages for a
comprehensive list of included software and the NeuroDebian
webpage (http://neuro.debian.net) for further information.
--------------
^[1] With some modules from GNOME 2.32.
^[2] This change implies that disk requirements for tasks
selected through the debian installer have increased too. For
more information please see the “Disk Space Needed for Tasks”
chapter in the Installation Guide (http://www.debian.org/releases
/stable/installmanual) .
^[3] These dependences are declared through the use of the header
format specified in the Linux Standard Base (LSB)
Chapter 3. Installation System
The Debian Installer is the official installation system for
Debian. It offers a variety of installation methods. Which
methods are available to install your system depends on your
architecture.
Images of the installer for squeeze can be found together with
the Installation Guide on the Debian website (http://
www.debian.org/releases/stable/debian-installer/) .
The Installation Guide is also included on the first CD/DVD of
the official Debian CD/DVD sets, at:
/doc/install/manual/language/index.html
You may also want to check the errata (http://www.debian.org/
releases/stable/debian-installer/index#errata) for
debian-installer for a list of known issues.
3.1. What's new in the installation system?
There has been a lot of development on the Debian Installer since
its first official release with Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (sarge)
resulting in both improved hardware support and some exciting new
features.
In these Release Notes we'll only list the major changes in the
installer. If you are interested in an overview of the detailed
changes since lenny, please check the release announcements for
the squeeze beta and RC releases available from the Debian
Installer's news history (http://www.debian.org/devel/
debian-installer/News/) .
3.1.1. Major changes
Dropped platforms
Support for the Alpha ('alpha'), ARM ('arm') and HP PA-RISC
('hppa') architectures has been dropped from the installer.
The 'arm' architecture is obsoleted by the ARM EABI ('armel')
port.
Help during the installation process
The dialogs presented during the installation process now
provide help information. Although not currently used in all
dialogs, this feature would be increasingly used in future
releases. This will improve the user experience during the
installation process, especially for new users.
Installation of Recommended packages
The installation system will install all recommended packages
by default throughout the process except for some specific
situations in which the general setting gives undesired
results.
Automatic installation of hardware-specific packages
The system will automatically select for installation
hardware-specific packages when they are appropriate. This is
achieved through the use of discover-pkginstall from the
discover package.
Support for installation of previous releases
The installation system can be also used for the installation
of previous release, such as lenny.
Improved mirror selection
The installation system provides better support for
installing both squeeze as well as lenny and older releases
(through the use of archive.debian.org). In addition, it will
also check that the selected mirror is consistent and holds
the selected release.
Changes in partitioning features
This release of the installer supports the use of the ext4
file system and it also simplifies the creation of RAID, LVM
and crypto protected partitioning systems. Support for the
reiserfs file system is no longer included by default,
although it can be optionally loaded.
Support for loading firmware debs during installation
It is now possible to load firmware package files from the
installation media in addition to removable media, allowing
the creation of PXE images and CDs/DVDs with included
firmware packages.
Starting with Debian 6.0, non-free firmware has been moved
out of main. To install Debian on hardware that needs
non-free firmware, you can either provide the firmware
yourself during installation or use pre-made non-free CDs/
DVDs which include the firmware. See the Getting Debian
section (http://www.debian.org/distrib) on the Debian website
for more information.
New languages
Thanks to the huge efforts of translators, Debian GNU/Linux
can now be installed in 70 languages. This is seven more
languages than in lenny. Most languages are available in both
the text-based installation user interface and the graphical
user interface, while some are only available in the
graphical user interface.
Languages added in this release include:
* Asturian, Estonian, Icelandic, Kazakh and Persian have
been added to the graphical and text-based installer.
* Kannada, Lao, Sinhala and Telugu have been added to the
graphical installer.
* Thai, previously available only in the graphical user
interface, is now available also in the text-based
installation user interface too.
Due to the lack of translation updates two languages were
dropped in this release: Wolof and Welsh.
Improved localisation selection
The selection of localisation-related values (language,
location and locale settings) is now less interdependent and
more flexible. Users will be able to customize the system to
their localisation needs more easily while still make it
comfortable to use for users that want to select the locale
most common for the country they reside in.
Additionally, the consequences of localisation choices (such
as timezone, keymap and mirror selection) are now more
obvious to the user.
Live system installation
The installer now supports live systems in two ways. First,
an installer included on live system media can use the
contents of the live system in place of the regular
installation of the base system. Second, the installer may
now be launched while running the live system, allowing the
user to do other things with the live system during the
install. Both features are built into the Debian Live images
offered at http://cdimage.debian.org/ (http://
cdimage.debian.org/) .
3.1.2. Automated installation
Some changes mentioned in the previous section also imply changes
in the support in the installer for automated installation using
preconfiguration files. This means that if you have existing
preconfiguration files that worked with the lenny installer, you
cannot expect these to work with the new installer without
modification.
The Installation Guide (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/
installmanual) has an updated separate appendix with extensive
documentation on using preconfiguration.
Chapter 4. Upgrades from Debian 5.0 (lenny)
4.1. Preparing for the upgrade
We suggest that before upgrading you also read the information in
Chapter 5, Issues to be aware of for squeeze. That chapter covers
potential issues not directly related to the upgrade process but
which could still be important to know about before you begin.
4.1.1. Back up any data or configuration information
Before upgrading your system, it is strongly recommended that you
make a full backup, or at least back up any data or configuration
information you can't afford to lose. The upgrade tools and
process are quite reliable, but a hardware failure in the middle
of an upgrade could result in a severely damaged system.
The main things you'll want to back up are the contents of /etc,
/var/lib/dpkg, /var/lib/apt/extended_states and the output of
dpkg --get-selections "*" (the quotes are important). If you use
aptitude to manage packages on your system, you will also want to
back up /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates.
The upgrade process itself does not modify anything in the /home
directory. However, some applications (e.g. parts of the Mozilla
suite, and the GNOME and KDE desktop environments) are known to
overwrite existing user settings with new defaults when a new
version of the application is first started by a user. As a
precaution, you may want to make a backup of the hidden files and
directories (“dotfiles”) in users' home directories. This backup
may help to restore or recreate the old settings. You may also
want to inform users about this.
Any package installation operation must be run with superuser
privileges, so either log in as root or use su or sudo to gain
the necessary access rights.
The upgrade has a few preconditions; you should check them before
actually executing the upgrade.
4.1.2. Inform users in advance
It's wise to inform all users in advance of any upgrades you're
planning, although users accessing your system via an ssh
connection should notice little during the upgrade, and should be
able to continue working.
If you wish to take extra precautions, back up or unmount the /
home partition before upgrading.
You will have to do a kernel upgrade when upgrading to squeeze,
so a reboot will be necessary.
4.1.3. Prepare for downtime on services
There might be services that are offered by the system which are
associated with packages that will be included in the upgrade. If
this is the case, please note that, during the upgrade, these
services will be stopped while their associated packages are
being replaced and configured. During this time, these services
will not be available.
The precise downtime for these services will vary depending on
the number of packages being upgraded in the system, and it also
includes the time the system administrator answers the
configuration questions from different package upgrades (if any).
Notice that if the upgrade process is left unattended and the
system requests input throughout the upgrade there is a high
possibility of services being unavailable^[4] for a significant
period of time.
If the system being upgraded provides critical services for your
users or the network^[5], you can reduce the downtime if you do a
minimal system upgrade, as described in Section 4.4.4, “Minimal
system upgrade”, followed by a kernel upgrade and reboot (see
Section 4.4.5, “Upgrading the kernel and udev”), and then upgrade
the packages associated with your critical services. Upgrade
these packages prior to doing the full upgrade described in
Section 4.4.6, “Upgrading the system”. This way you can ensure
that these critical services are running and available through
the full upgrade process, and their downtime is reduced.
4.1.4. Prepare for recovery
Because of the many changes in the kernel between lenny and
squeeze regarding drivers, hardware discovery and the naming and
ordering of device files, there is a real risk that you may
experience problems rebooting your system after the upgrade. A
lot of known potential issues are documented in this and the next
chapters of these Release Notes.
For that reason it makes sense to ensure that you will be able to
recover if your system should fail to reboot or, for remotely
managed systems, fail to bring up networking.
If you are upgrading remotely via an ssh link it is highly
recommended that you take the necessary precautions to be able to
access the server through a remote serial terminal. There is a
chance that, after upgrading the kernel and rebooting, some
devices will be renamed (as described in Section 4.6.2, “Device
enumeration reordering” ) and you will have to fix the system
configuration through a local console. Also, if the system is
rebooted accidentally in the middle of an upgrade there is a
chance you will need to recover using a local console.
The most obvious thing to try first is to reboot with your old
kernel. However, for various reasons documented elsewhere in this
document, this is not guaranteed to work.
If that fails, you will need an alternative way to boot your
system so you can access and repair it. One option is to use a
special rescue image or a Linux live CD. After booting from that,
you should be able to mount your root file system and chroot into
it to investigate and fix the problem.
Another option we'd like to recommend is to use the rescue mode
of the squeeze Debian Installer. The advantage of using the
installer is that you can choose between its many installation
methods for one that best suits your situation. For more
information, please consult the section “Recovering a Broken
System” in chapter 8 of the Installation Guide (http://
www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual) and the Debian
Installer FAQ (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/FAQ) .
4.1.4.1. Debug shell during boot using initrd
The initramfs-tools includes a debug shell^[6] in the initrds it
generates. If for example the initrd is unable to mount your root
file system, you will be dropped into this debug shell which has
basic commands available to help trace the problem and possibly
fix it.
Basic things to check are: presence of correct device files in /
dev; what modules are loaded (cat /proc/modules); output of dmesg
for errors loading drivers. The output of dmesg will also show
what device files have been assigned to which disks; you should
check that against the output of echo $ROOT to make sure that the
root file system is on the expected device.
If you do manage to fix the problem, typing exit will quit the
debug shell and continue the boot process at the point it failed.
Of course you will also need to fix the underlying problem and
regenerate the initrd so the next boot won't fail again.
4.1.5. Prepare a safe environment for the upgrade
The distribution upgrade should be done either locally from a
textmode virtual console (or a directly connected serial
terminal), or remotely via an ssh link.
Important
If you are using some VPN services (such as tinc) they might not
be available throughout the upgrade process. Please see
Section 4.1.3, “Prepare for downtime on services”.
In order to gain extra safety margin when upgrading remotely, we
suggest that you run upgrade processes in the virtual console
provided by the screen program, which enables safe reconnection
and ensures the upgrade process is not interrupted even if the
remote connection process fails.
Important
You should not upgrade using telnet, rlogin, rsh, or from an X
session managed by xdm, gdm or kdm etc on the machine you are
upgrading. That is because each of those services may well be
terminated during the upgrade, which can result in an
inaccessible system that is only half-upgraded. Use of the GNOME
application update-manager is strongly discouraged for upgrades
to new releases, as this tool relies on the desktop session
remaining active.
4.1.6. Remove conflicting packages
Due to bug #512951 (http://bugs.debian.org/512951) , the splashy
package needs to be purged prior to the upgrade.
# apt-get purge splashy
4.2. Checking system status
The upgrade process described in this chapter has been designed
for upgrades from “pure” lenny systems without third-party
packages. For the greatest reliability of the upgrade process,
you may wish to remove third-party packages from your system
before you begin upgrading.
Direct upgrades from Debian releases older than 5.0 (lenny) are
not supported. Please follow the instructions in the Release
Notes for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (http://www.debian.org/releases/
lenny/releasenotes) to upgrade to 5.0 first.
This procedure also assumes your system has been updated to the
latest point release of lenny. If you have not done this or are
unsure, follow the instructions in Section A.1, “Upgrading your
lenny system”.
4.2.1. Review actions pending in package manager
In some cases, the use of apt-get for installing packages instead
of aptitude might make aptitude consider a package as “unused”
and schedule it for removal. In general, you should make sure the
system is fully up-to-date and “clean” before proceeding with the
upgrade.
Because of this you should review if there are any pending
actions in the package manager aptitude. If a package is
scheduled for removal or update in the package manager, it might
negatively impact the upgrade procedure. Note that correcting
this is only possible if your sources.list still points to lenny
and not to stable or squeeze; see Section A.2, “Checking your
sources list”.
To perform this review, launch aptitude in “visual mode” and
press g (“Go”). If it shows any actions, you should review them
and either fix them or implement the suggested actions. If no
actions are suggested you will be presented with a message saying
“No packages are scheduled to be installed, removed, or upgraded”
.
4.2.2. Disabling APT pinning
If you have configured APT to install certain packages from a
distribution other than stable (e.g. from testing), you may have
to change your APT pinning configuration (stored in /etc/apt/
preferences) to allow the upgrade of packages to the versions in
the new stable release. Further information on APT pinning can be
found in apt_preferences(5).
4.2.3. Checking packages status
Regardless of the method used for upgrading, it is recommended
that you check the status of all packages first, and verify that
all packages are in an upgradable state. The following command
will show any packages which have a status of Half-Installed or
Failed-Config, and those with any error status.
# dpkg --audit
You could also inspect the state of all packages on your system
using dselect, aptitude, or with commands such as
# dpkg -l | pager
or
# dpkg --get-selections "*" > ~/curr-pkgs.txt
It is desirable to remove any holds before upgrading. If any
package that is essential for the upgrade is on hold, the upgrade
will fail.
Note that aptitude uses a different method for registering
packages that are on hold than apt-get and dselect. You can
identify packages on hold for aptitude with
# aptitude search "~ahold"
If you want to check which packages you had on hold for apt-get,
you should use
# dpkg --get-selections | grep hold
If you changed and recompiled a package locally, and didn't
rename it or put an epoch in the version, you must put it on hold
to prevent it from being upgraded.
The “hold” package state for apt-get can be changed using:
# echo package_name hold | dpkg --set-selections
Replace hold with install to unset the “hold” state.
If there is anything you need to fix, it is best to make sure
your sources.list still refers to lenny as explained in
Section A.2, “Checking your sources list”.
4.2.4. The proposed-updates section
If you have listed the proposed-updates section in your /etc/apt/
sources.list file, you should remove it from that file before
attempting to upgrade your system. This is a precaution to reduce
the likelihood of conflicts.
4.2.5. Unofficial sources and backports
If you have any non-Debian packages on your system, you should be
aware that these may be removed during the upgrade because of
conflicting dependencies. If these packages were installed by
adding an extra package archive in your /etc/apt/sources.list,
you should check if that archive also offers packages compiled
for squeeze and change the source line accordingly at the same
time as your source lines for Debian packages.
Some users may have unofficial backported “newer” versions of
packages that are in Debian installed on their lenny system. Such
packages are most likely to cause problems during an upgrade as
they may result in file conflicts^[7]. Section 4.5, “Possible
issues during upgrade” has some information on how to deal with
file conflicts if they should occur.
4.3. Preparing sources for APT
Before starting the upgrade you must set up apt's configuration
file for package lists, /etc/apt/sources.list.
apt will consider all packages that can be found via any “deb”
line, and install the package with the highest version number,
giving priority to the first line in the file (thus where you
have multiple mirror locations, you'd typically first name a
local hard disk, then CD-ROMs, and then HTTP/FTP mirrors).
A release can often be referred to both by its codename (e.g.
lenny, squeeze) and by its status name (i.e. oldstable, stable,
testing, unstable). Referring to a release by its codename has
the advantage that you will never be surprised by a new release
and for this reason is the approach taken here. It does of course
mean that you will have to watch out for release announcements
yourself. If you use the status name instead, you will just see
loads of updates for packages available as soon as a release has
happened.
4.3.1. Adding APT Internet sources
The default configuration is set up for installation from main
Debian Internet servers, but you may wish to modify /etc/apt/
sources.list to use other mirrors, preferably a mirror that is
network-wise closest to you.
Debian HTTP or FTP mirror addresses can be found at http://
www.debian.org/distrib/ftplist (http://www.debian.org/distrib/
ftplist) (look at the “list of Debian mirrors” section). HTTP
mirrors are generally speedier than FTP mirrors.
For example, suppose your closest Debian mirror is http://
mirrors.kernel.org. When inspecting that mirror with a web
browser or FTP program, you will notice that the main directories
are organized like this:
http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/dists/squeeze/main/binary-ia64/...
http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/dists/squeeze/contrib/binary-ia64/...
To use this mirror with apt, you add this line to your
sources.list file:
deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian squeeze main contrib
Note that the `dists' is added implicitly, and the arguments
after the release name are used to expand the path into multiple
directories.
After adding your new sources, disable the previously existing “
deb” lines in sources.list by placing a hash sign (#) in front of
them.
4.3.2. Adding APT sources for a local mirror
Instead of using HTTP or FTP package mirrors, you may wish to
modify /etc/apt/sources.list to use a mirror on a local disk
(possibly mounted over NFS).
For example, your package mirror may be under /var/ftp/debian/,
and have main directories like this:
/var/ftp/debian/dists/squeeze/main/binary-ia64/...
/var/ftp/debian/dists/squeeze/contrib/binary-ia64/...
To use this with apt, add this line to your sources.list file:
deb file:/var/ftp/debian squeeze main contrib
Note that the `dists' is added implicitly, and the arguments
after the release name are used to expand the path into multiple
directories.
After adding your new sources, disable the previously existing “
deb” lines in sources.list by placing a hash sign (#) in front of
them.
4.3.3. Adding APT source from CD-ROM or DVD
If you want to use CDs only, comment out the existing “deb” lines
in /etc/apt/sources.list by placing a hash sign (#) in front of
them.
Make sure there is a line in /etc/fstab that enables mounting
your CD-ROM drive at the /cdrom mount point (the exact /cdrom
mount point is required for apt-cdrom). For example, if /dev/hdc
is your CD-ROM drive, /etc/fstab should contain a line like:
/dev/hdc /cdrom auto defaults,noauto,ro 0 0
Note that there must be no spaces between the words
defaults,noauto,ro in the fourth field.
To verify it works, insert a CD and try running
# mount /cdrom # this will mount the CD to the mount point
# ls -alF /cdrom # this should show the CD's root directory
# umount /cdrom # this will unmount the CD
Next, run:
# apt-cdrom add
for each Debian Binary CD-ROM you have, to add the data about
each CD to APT's database.
4.4. Upgrading packages
The recommended way to upgrade from previous Debian GNU/Linux
releases is to use the package management tool apt-get. In
previous releases, aptitude was recommended for this purpose, but
recent versions of apt-get provide equivalent functionality and
also have shown to more consistently give the desired upgrade
results.
Don't forget to mount all needed partitions (notably the root and
/usr partitions) read-write, with a command like:
# mount -o remount,rw /mountpoint
Next you should double-check that the APT source entries (in /etc
/apt/sources.list) refer either to “squeeze” or to “stable”.
There should not be any sources entries pointing to lenny.
+--------------------------------------------------+
|Note |
| |
|Source lines for a CD-ROM might sometimes refer to|
|“unstable”; although this may be confusing, you |
|should not change it. |
+--------------------------------------------------+
4.4.1. Recording the session
It is strongly recommended that you use the /usr/bin/script
program to record a transcript of the upgrade session. Then if a
problem occurs, you will have a log of what happened, and if
needed, can provide exact information in a bug report. To start
the recording, type:
# script -t 2>~/upgrade-squeezestep.time -a ~/upgrade-squeezestep.script
or similar. If you have to rerun the typescript (e.g. if you have
to reboot the system) use different step values to indicate which
step of the upgrade you are logging. Do not put the typescript
file in a temporary directory such as /tmp or /var/tmp (files in
those directories may be deleted during the upgrade or during any
restart).
The typescript will also allow you to review information that has
scrolled off-screen. If you are at the system's console, just
switch to VT2 (using Alt+F2) and, after logging in, use less -R
~root/upgrade-squeeze.script to view the file.
After you have completed the upgrade, you can stop script by
typing exit at the prompt.
If you have used the -t switch for script you can use the
scriptreplay program to replay the whole session:
# scriptreplay ~/upgrade-squeeze.time ~/upgrade-squeeze.script
4.4.2. Updating the package list
First the list of available packages for the new release needs to
be fetched. This is done by executing:
# apt-get update
4.4.3. Make sure you have sufficient space for the upgrade
You have to make sure before upgrading your system that you have
sufficient hard disk space when you start the full system upgrade
described in Section 4.4.6, “Upgrading the system”. First, any
package needed for installation that is fetched from the network
is stored in /var/cache/apt/archives (and the partial/
subdirectory, during download), so you must make sure you have
enough space on the file system partition that holds /var/ to
temporarily download the packages that will be installed in your
system. After the download, you will probably need more space in
other file system partitions in order to both install upgraded
packages (which might contain bigger binaries or more data) and
new packages that will be pulled in for the upgrade. If your
system does not have sufficient space you might end up with an
incomplete upgrade that might be difficult to recover from.
apt-get can show you detailed information of the disk space
needed for the installation. Before executing the upgrade, you
can see this estimate by running:
# apt-get -o APT::Get::Trivial-Only=true dist-upgrade
[ ... ]
XXX upgraded, XXX newly installed, XXX to remove and XXX not upgraded.
Need to get xx.xMB of archives.
After this operation, AAAMB of additional disk space will be used.
Note
Running this command at the beginning of the upgrade process may
give an error, for the reasons described in the next sections. In
that case you will need to wait until you've done the minimal
system upgrade as in Section 4.4.4, “Minimal system upgrade” and
upgraded your kernel before running this command to estimate the
disk space.
If you do not have enough space for the upgrade, apt-get will
warn you with a message like this:
E: You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/.
In this situation, make sure you free up space beforehand. You
can:
* Remove packages that have been previously downloaded for
installation (at /var/cache/apt/archives). Cleaning up the
package cache by running apt-get clean will remove all previously
downloaded package files.
* Remove forgotten packages. If you have popularity-contest
installed, you can use popcon-largest-unused to list the packages
you do not use that occupy the most space. You can also use
deborphan or debfoster to find obsolete packages (see
Section 4.9, “Obsolete packages” ). Alternatively you can start
aptitude in “visual mode” and find obsolete packages under “
Obsolete and Locally Created Packages”.
* Remove packages that take up too much space and are not currently
needed (you can always reinstall them after the upgrade). You can
list the packages that take up the most disk space with dpigs
(available in the debian-goodies package) or with wajig (running
wajig size).
You can list packages that take up most of the disk space with
aptitude. Start aptitude in “visual mode”, select Views → New
Flat Package List, press l and enter ~i, press S and enter
~installsize, then it will give you nice list to work with.
* Remove translations and localization files from the system if
they are not needed. You can install the localepurge package and
configure it so that only a few selected locales are kept in the
system. This will reduce the disk space consumed at /usr/share/
locale.
* Temporarily move to another system, or permanently remove, system
logs residing under /var/log/.
* Use a temporary /var/cache/apt/archives: You can use a temporary
cache directory from another filesystem (USB storage device,
temporary hard disk, filesystem already in use, ...)
+-----------------------------------------------------+
|Note |
| |
|Do not use an NFS mount as the network connection |
|could be interrupted during the upgrade. |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
For example, if you have a USB drive mounted on /media/usbkey:
1. remove the packages that have been previously downloaded for
installation:
# apt-get clean
2. copy the directory /var/cache/apt/archives to the USB drive:
# cp -ax /var/cache/apt/archives /media/usbkey/
3. mount the temporary cache directory on the current one:
# mount --bind /media/usbkey/archives /var/cache/apt/archives
4. after the upgrade, restore the original /var/cache/apt/
archives directory:
# umount /media/usbkey/archives
5. remove the remaining /media/usbkey/archives.
You can create the temporary cache directory on whatever
filesystem is mounted on your system.
* Do a minimal upgrade of the system (see Section 4.4.4, “Minimal
system upgrade”) or partial upgrades of the system followed by a
full upgrade. This will make it possible to upgrade the system
partially, and allow you to clean the package cache before the
full upgrade.
Note that in order to safely remove packages, it is advisable to
switch your sources.list back to lenny as described in
Section A.2, “Checking your sources list”.
4.4.4. Minimal system upgrade
In some cases, doing the full upgrade (as described below)
directly might remove large numbers of packages that you will
want to keep. We therefore recommend a two-part upgrade process,
first a minimal upgrade to overcome these conflicts, then a full
upgrade as described in Section 4.4.6, “Upgrading the system”.
To do this first, run:
# apt-get upgrade
This has the effect of upgrading those packages which can be
upgraded without requiring any other packages to be removed or
installed.
The minimal system upgrade can also be useful when the system is
tight on space and a full upgrade cannot be run due to space
constrains.
4.4.5. Upgrading the kernel and udev
The udev version in squeeze requires a kernel of version 2.6.26
or newer with the CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED option disabled and the
CONFIG_INOTIFY_USER and CONFIG_SIGNALFD options enabled. Because
the standard Debian kernels in lenny (version 2.6.26) have
CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED enabled, and the udev version in lenny
will not provide all the functionality expected by the latest
kernels, special care must be taken when upgrading to avoid
putting your system in an unbootable state.
Booting the 2.6.26 kernel from lenny with the udev from squeeze
may result in a failure to correctly assign names to network
devices, and will also fail to apply certain additional
permissions to block devices (such as access by the disk group).
The software itself will appear to be working, but some rules
(for example, network-based rules) will not be loaded properly.
It is therefore strongly recommended that you upgrade the kernel
on its own at this point, to ensure a compatible kernel is
available before upgrading udev.
To proceed with this kernel upgrade, run:
# apt-get install linux-image-2.6-flavor
See Section 4.6.1, “Installing the kernel metapackage” for help
in determining which flavor of kernel package you should install.
The move of some firmware to separate packages in the non-free
archive (see Section 2.1.2, “Firmware moved to the non-free
section”) means that it may be necessary to install additional
firmware packages after upgrading to the new kernel to support
some hardware. Some hardware that was operating correctly before
the upgrade might fail to work once the kernel is upgraded. Look
out for warning messages from the kernel install or initramfs
generation scripts, and make sure the necessary firmware packages
are installed.
Immediately after upgrading the kernel, you should also install
the new udev to minimize the risk of other incompatibilities
caused by using the old udev with a new kernel ^[8]. You can do
this by running:
# apt-get install udev
You should reboot the system ^[9] once you have upgraded both the
kernel and udev.
4.4.6. Upgrading the system
Once you have taken the previous steps, you are now ready to
continue with the main part of the upgrade. Execute:
# apt-get dist-upgrade
Note
The upgrade process for other releases recommended the use of
aptitude for the upgrade. This tool is not recommended for
upgrades from lenny to squeeze.
This will perform a complete upgrade of the system, i.e. install
the newest available versions of all packages, and resolve all
possible dependency changes between packages in different
releases. If necessary, it will install some new packages
(usually new library versions, or renamed packages), and remove
any conflicting obsoleted packages.
When upgrading from a set of CD-ROMs (or DVDs), you will be asked
to insert specific CDs at several points during the upgrade. You
might have to insert the same CD multiple times; this is due to
inter-related packages that have been spread out over the CDs.
New versions of currently installed packages that cannot be
upgraded without changing the install status of another package
will be left at their current version (displayed as “held back”).
This can be resolved by either using aptitude to choose these
packages for installation or by trying apt-get -f install package
.
4.5. Possible issues during upgrade
The following sections describe known issues that might appear
during an upgrade to squeeze.
4.5.1. cryptoloop support not included in the squeeze Linux kernel
Support for cryptoloop has been dropped from the Linux kernel
packages included in Debian 6.0. Existing installations using
cryptoloop need to be transitioned to dm-crypt before the
upgrade.
4.5.2. Expected removals
The upgrade process to squeeze might ask for removal of packages
in the system. The precise list of packages will vary depending
on the set of packages that you have installed. These release
notes give general advice on these removals, but if in doubt, it
is recommended that you examine the package removals proposed by
each method before proceeding.
Some common packages that are expected to be removed include:
autofs (replaced by autofs5), dhcp3 (replaced by isc-dhcp),
madwifi-source and python2.4 (replaced by python2.6). For more
information about packages obsoleted in squeeze, see Section 4.9,
“Obsolete packages”.
4.5.3. Errors running aptitude or apt-get
If an operation using aptitude, apt-get, or dpkg fails with the
error
E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
the default cache space is insufficient. You can solve this by
either removing or commenting lines you don't need in /etc/apt/
sources.list or increasing the cache size. The cache size can be
increased by setting APT::Cache-Limit in /etc/apt/apt.conf. The
following command will set it to a value that should be
sufficient for the upgrade:
# echo 'APT::Cache-Limit "12500000";' >> /etc/apt/apt.conf
This assumes that you do not yet have this variable set in that
file.
4.5.4. Conflicts or Pre-Depends loops
Sometimes it's necessary to enable the APT::Force-LoopBreak
option in APT to be able to temporarily remove an essential
package due to a Conflicts/Pre-Depends loop. apt-get will alert
you of this and abort the upgrade. You can work around this by
specifying the option -o APT::Force-LoopBreak=1 on the apt-get
command line.
It is possible that a system's dependency structure can be so
corrupt as to require manual intervention. Usually this means
using apt-get or
# dpkg --remove package_name
to eliminate some of the offending packages, or
# apt-get -f install
# dpkg --configure --pending
In extreme cases you might have to force re-installation with a
command like
# dpkg --install /path/to/package_name.deb
4.5.5. File conflicts
File conflicts should not occur if you upgrade from a “pure”
lenny system, but can occur if you have unofficial backports
installed. A file conflict will result in an error like:
Unpacking <package-foo> (from <package-foo-file>) ...
dpkg: error processing <package-foo> (--install):
trying to overwrite `<some-file-name>',
which is also in package <package-bar>
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
<package-foo>
You can try to solve a file conflict by forcibly removing the
package mentioned on the last line of the error message:
# dpkg -r --force-depends package_name
After fixing things up, you should be able to resume the upgrade
by repeating the previously described apt-get commands.
4.5.6. Configuration changes
During the upgrade, you will be asked questions regarding the
configuration or re-configuration of several packages. When you
are asked if any file in the /etc/init.d directory, or the /etc/
manpath.config file should be replaced by the package
maintainer's version, it's usually necessary to answer `yes' to
ensure system consistency. You can always revert to the old
versions, since they will be saved with a .dpkg-old extension.
If you're not sure what to do, write down the name of the package
or file and sort things out at a later time. You can search in
the typescript file to review the information that was on the
screen during the upgrade.
4.5.7. Change of session to console
If you are running the upgrade using the system's local console
you might find that at some points during the upgrade the console
is shifted over to a different view and you lose visibility of
the upgrade process. For example, this will happen in desktop
systems when gdm is restarted.
To recover the console where the upgrade was running you will
have to use Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch back to the virtual terminal 1
if in the graphical startup screen or use Alt+F1 if in the local
text-mode console. Replace F1 with the function key with the same
number of the virtual terminal the upgrade was running in. You
can also use Alt+Left Arrow or Alt+Right Arrow to switch between
the different text-mode terminals.
4.5.8. Special care for specific packages
In most cases, packages should upgrade smoothly between lenny and
squeeze. There are a small number of cases where some
intervention may be required, either before or during the
upgrade; these are detailed below on a per-package basis.
4.5.8.1. Evolution
Evolution (the GNOME Desktop mail client) has been updated from
version 2.22 to 2.30. This changes the storage format used by the
package for local data and there is a possibility of data loss if
the upgrade is performed whilst evolution is running. Exiting the
application itself may not be sufficient, as various related
components will continue to run in the background. To avoid any
potential issues, it is recommended that you completely exit your
desktop environment before beginning the upgrade to squeeze.
As part of the upgrade process, evolution will check whether any
related processes are running and will recommend that they be
closed. A secondary check for processes will then be performed;
if necessary, a choice will be offered between allowing the
remaining processes to be killed or aborting the upgrade in order
to resolve the situation by hand.
4.6. Upgrading your kernel and related packages
This section explains how to upgrade your kernel and identifies
potential issues related to this upgrade. You can either install
one of the linux-image-* packages provided by Debian, or compile
a customized kernel from source.
Note that a lot of information in this section is based on the
assumption that you will be using one of the modular Debian
kernels, together with initramfs-tools and udev. If you choose to
use a custom kernel that does not require an initrd or if you use
a different initrd generator, some of the information may not be
relevant for you.
4.6.1. Installing the kernel metapackage
When you dist-upgrade from lenny to squeeze, it is strongly
recommended that you install a new linux-image-2.6-* metapackage.
This package may be installed automatically by the dist-upgrade
process. You can verify this by running:
# dpkg -l "linux-image*" | grep ^ii
If you do not see any output, then you will need to install a new
linux-image package by hand. To see a list of available
linux-image-2.6 metapackages, run:
# apt-cache search linux-image-2.6- | grep -v transition
If you are unsure about which package to select, run uname -r and
look for a package with a similar name. For example, if you see
'2.6.26-2-686', it is recommended that you install
linux-image-2.6-686. You may also use apt-cache to see a long
description of each package in order to help choose the best one
available. For example:
# apt-cache show linux-image-2.6-686
You should then use apt-get install to install it. Once this new
kernel is installed you should reboot at the next available
opportunity to get the benefits provided by the new kernel
version.
For the more adventurous there is an easy way to compile your own
custom kernel on Debian GNU/Linux. Install the kernel-package
tool and read the documentation in /usr/share/doc/kernel-package.
Alternatively, you can also use the kernel sources, provided in
the linux-source-2.6 package. You can make use of the deb-pkg
target available in the sources' makefile for building a binary
package. There are some differences in these two approaches,
please consult the respective package's documentation.
If possible, it is to your advantage to upgrade the kernel
package separately from the main dist-upgrade to reduce the
chances of a temporarily non-bootable system. Note that this
should only be done after the minimal upgrade process described
in Section 4.4.4, “Minimal system upgrade”.
4.6.2. Device enumeration reordering
In lenny and later, a new kernel mechanism for hardware discovery
may change the order in which devices are discovered on your
system on each boot, affecting the device names assigned to them.
For example, if you have two network adapters that are associated
with two different drivers, the devices eth0 and eth1 refer to
may be swapped.
For network devices, this reordering is normally avoided by the
definitions at /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules for udev
. Since these rules were already in place in lenny, no additional
action should be required when upgrading to squeeze to get the
benefit of stable network device names. Please note, however,
that this udev mechanism means that a given network device name
is tied to a particular piece of hardware; if you, for instance,
exchange ethernet adapters in a deployed squeeze system, the new
adapter will get a new interface name instead of using the
existing one. To reuse an existing device name for new hardware,
you will need to delete the associated entry from /etc/udev/
rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules.
For storage devices, you may be able to avoid this reordering by
using initramfs-tools and configuring it to load storage device
driver modules in the same order they are currently loaded.
However, in light of other changes to the storage subsystem of
the Linux kernel as described at Section 5.1.1, “Migration of
disk drivers from IDE to PATA subsystem”, this is usually not
worth the effort and it is recommended instead to use device
names that are guaranteed to be stable over time, such as the
UUID aliases ^[10] in the /dev/disk/by-uuid/ directory or LVM
device names in /dev/mapper/.
4.6.3. Boot timing issues (waiting for root device)
If an initrd created with initramfs-tools is used to boot the
system, in some cases the creation of device files by udev can
happen too late for the boot scripts to act on.
The usual symptoms are that the boot will fail because the root
file system cannot be mounted and you are dropped into a debug
shell:
Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
- Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
- Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/something does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
(initramfs)
But if you check afterwards, all devices that are needed are
present in /dev. This has been observed in cases where the root
file system is on a USB disk or on RAID, especially if LILO is
used.
A workaround for this issue is to use the boot parameter
rootdelay=9. The value for the timeout (in seconds) may need to
be adjusted.
4.7. Preparing for the next release
After the upgrade there are several things you can do to prepare
for the next release.
* Remove obsolete and unused packages as described in
Section 4.9, “Obsolete packages”. You should review which
configuration files they use and consider purging the
packages to remove their configuration files.
4.8. Deprecated components
With the next release of Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 (codenamed wheezy)
some features will be deprecated. Users will need to migrate to
other alternatives to prevent trouble when updating to 7.0.
This includes the following features:
* OpenVZ and Linux-Vserver: Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 will be the
last release to include Linux kernel virtualization
featuresets outside of mainline. This means that the OpenVZ
and Linux-Vserver featuresets should be considered
deprecated, and users should migrate to linux-2.6 upstream
merged virtualization solutions like KVM, Linux Containers or
Xen.
* The gdm package (GNOME Display Manager version 2.20) will be
obsoleted by gdm3, a rewritten version. See Section 5.6,
“GNOME desktop changes and support” for more information.
4.9. Obsolete packages
Introducing several thousand new packages, squeeze also retires
and omits more than four thousand old packages that were in
lenny. It provides no upgrade path for these obsolete packages.
While nothing prevents you from continuing to use an obsolete
package where desired, the Debian project will usually
discontinue security support for it a year after squeeze's
release^[11], and will not normally provide other support in the
meantime. Replacing them with available alternatives, if any, is
recommended.
There are many reasons why packages might have been removed from
the distribution: they are no longer maintained upstream; there
is no longer a Debian Developer interested in maintaining the
packages; the functionality they provide has been superseded by
different software (or a new version); or they are no longer
considered suitable for squeeze due to bugs in them. In the
latter case, packages might still be present in the “unstable”
distribution.
Detecting which packages in an updated system are “obsolete” is
easy since the package management front-ends will mark them as
such. If you are using aptitude, you will see a listing of these
packages in the “Obsolete and Locally Created Packages” entry.
dselect provides a similar section but the listing it presents
might differ.
Also, if you have used aptitude or apt-get to manually install
packages in lenny it will have kept track of those packages you
manually installed and will be able to mark as obsolete those
packages pulled in by dependencies alone which are no longer
needed if a package has been removed. aptitude and apt, unlike
deborphan, will not mark for removal packages that you manually
installed, as opposed to those that were automatically installed
through dependencies. To remove automatically installed packages
that are no longer used, run:
# apt-get autoremove
There are additional tools you can use to find obsolete packages
such as deborphan, debfoster or cruft. deborphan is highly
recommended, although it will (in default mode) only report
obsolete libraries: packages in the “libs” or “oldlibs” sections
that are not used by any other packages. Do not blindly remove
the packages these tools present, especially if you are using
aggressive non-default options that are prone to produce false
positives. It is highly recommended that you manually review the
packages suggested for removal (i.e. their contents, size and
description) before you remove them.
The Debian Bug Tracking System (http://bugs.debian.org/) often
provides additional information on why the package was removed.
You should review both the archived bug reports for the package
itself and the archived bug reports for the ftp.debian.org
pseudo-package (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=
ftp.debian.org&archive=yes) .
The list of obsolete packages includes:
* The plone content management suite. This has been done on
request by the developers to use the Unified Installer for
Linux, which they consider their only supported deployment
platform. The recommended tool for installing Plone on a
Debian GNU/Linux system is the Unified Installer, available
for download from http://plone.org/ (http://plone.org/)
* nessus, the vulnerability scanning server and its associated
libraries and other software. It has been deprecated in favor
of the software provided by OpenVAS which includes
openvas-server and openvas-client. As there is no automatic
upgrade path you will have to install OpenVAS and manually
move over your Nessus service configuration (users,
certificates, etc.) to OpenVAS.
* postgresql-8.3, successor is postgresql-8.4.
* mysql-server-5.0, successor is mysql-server-5.1.
* python2.4, successor is python2.6.
* Java 5 software including the packages sun-java5-jre and
sun-java5-bin, successor is Java 6: sun-java6-jre and
associated packages.
* apt-proxy is no longer provided, alternatives to this tool
include apt-cacher-ng, apt-cacher and approx. Although no
automatic upgrade path exists, user of apt-proxy can switch
to these alternatives by manually installing any of these
packages.
* Some of Xorg's video drivers are no longer available in
squeeze and are obsolete. This includes
xserver-xorg-video-cyrix, xserver-xorg-video-i810,
xserver-xorg-video-imstt, xserver-xorg-video-nsc,
xserver-xorg-video-sunbw2, and xserver-xorg-video-vga. They
might be removed through the upgrade. Users should install
xserver-xorg-video-all instead.
* The utility used in lenny to display a splash image at boot
time, usplash, is no longer available. It has been replaced
by plymouth.
4.9.1. Dummy packages
Some packages from lenny have been split into several packages in
squeeze, often to improve system maintainability. To ease the
upgrade path in such cases, squeeze often provides “dummy”
packages: empty packages that have the same name as the old
package in lenny with dependencies that cause the new packages to
be installed. These “dummy” packages are considered obsolete
packages after the upgrade and can be safely removed.
Most (but not all) dummy packages' descriptions indicate their
purpose. Package descriptions for dummy packages are not uniform,
however, so you might also find deborphan with the --guess-*
options (e.g. --guess-dummy) useful to detect them in your
system. Note that some dummy packages are not intended to be
removed after an upgrade but are, instead, used to keep track of
the current available version of a program over time.
--------------
^[4] If the debconf priority is set to a very high level you
might prevent configuration prompts, but services that rely on
default answers that are not applicable to your system will fail
to start.
^[5] For example: DNS or DHCP services, specially when there is
no redundancy or failover. In the DHCP case end-users might be
disconnected from the network if the lease time is lower than the
time it takes for the upgrade process to complete.
^[6] This feature can be disabled by adding the parameter panic=0
to your boot parameters.
^[7] Debian's package management system normally does not allow a
package to remove or replace a file owned by another package
unless it has been defined to replace that package.
^[8] There are also known incompatibilities between the old
kernel and the new udev. If you find issues after the reboot with
the new kernel you will have to downgrade the udev in order to
use the old one.
^[9] If you are logging the upgrade as described in Section 4.4,
“Upgrading packages”, please, use script again to log the next
steps of the upgrade after the reboot in order to log the result
of the actions described in Section 4.4.6, “Upgrading the system”
.
^[10] Some devices, such as those used by crypt, RAID or LVM have
stable non-UUID identifiers. In these cases you should use the
name of the devices, which are already unambiguous and stable.
^[11] Or for as long as there is not another release in that time
frame. Typically only two stable releases are supported at any
given time.
Chapter 5. Issues to be aware of for squeeze
5.1. Potential problems
Sometimes, changes introduced in a new release have side-effects
we cannot reasonably avoid, or they expose bugs somewhere else.
This section documents issues we are aware of. Please also read
the errata, the relevant packages' documentation, bug reports and
other information mentioned in Section 6.1, “Further reading”.
5.1.1. Migration of disk drivers from IDE to PATA subsystem
The new Linux kernel version provides different drivers for some
PATA (IDE) controllers. The names of some hard disk, CD-ROM, and
tape devices may change.
It is now recommended to identify disk devices in configuration
files by label or UUID (unique identifier) rather than by device
name, which will work with both old and new kernel versions. Upon
upgrading to the squeeze version of the Debian kernel packages,
the linux-base package will offer to do this conversion for you
in the config files for most of the filesystem-related packages
on the system, including the various bootloaders included in
Debian. If you choose not to update the system configuration
automatically, or if you are not using the Debian kernel
packages, you must update device IDs yourself before the next
system reboot to ensure the system remains bootable.
5.1.2. mdadm metadata format change requires recent Grub
The following only applies to users who want to let the grub-pc
bootloader load the kernel directly off a RAID device created
with mdadm 3.x and default values, or when the metadata version
is explicitly set using -e. Specifically, this includes all
arrays created during or after the installation of Debian
squeeze. Arrays created with older mdadm versions, and RAIDs
created with the command-line option -e 0.9 are not affected.
Versions of grub-pc older than 1.98+20100720-1 will not be able
to boot directly off a RAID with the 1.x metadata formats (the
new default is 1.2). To ensure a bootable system, please make
sure to use grub-pc 1.98+20100720-1 or later, which is provided
by Debian squeeze. An unbootable system may be rescued with Super
Grub2 Disk (http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/) or
grml (http://grml.org) .
5.1.3. pam_userdb.so breakage with newer libdb
Some Berkeley Database version 7 files created with libdb3 cannot
be read by newer libdb versions (see bug #521860 (http://
bugs.debian.org/521860) ). As a workaround, the files can be
recreated with db4.8_load, from the db4.8-util package.
5.1.4. Potential issues with diversions of /bin/sh
If you have previously added a local diversion for /bin/sh, or
modified the /bin/sh symlink to point to somewhere other than /
bin/bash, then you may encounter problems when upgrading the dash
or bash packages. Note that this includes changes made by
allowing other packages (for example mksh) to become the default
system shell by taking over /bin/sh.
If you encounter any such issues, please remove the local
diversion and ensure that the symlinks for both /bin/sh and its
manual page point to the files provided by the bash package and
then dpkg-reconfigure --force dash.
dpkg-divert --remove /bin/sh
dpkg-divert --remove /usr/share/man/man1/sh.1.gz
ln -sf bash /bin/sh
ln -sf bash.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1/sh.1.gz
5.1.5. Change in kernel policy regarding resource conflicts
The default setting for the acpi_enforce_resources parameter in
the Linux kernel has changed to be “strict” by default. This can
lead some legacy sensor drivers to be denied access to the
sensors' hardware. One workaround is to append “
acpi_enforce_resources=lax” to the kernel command line.
5.2. LDAP support
A feature in the cryptography libraries used in the LDAP
libraries causes programs that use LDAP and attempt to change
their effective privileges to fail when connecting to an LDAP
server using TLS or SSL. This can cause problems for suid
programs on systems using libnss-ldap like sudo, su or schroot
and for suid programs that perform LDAP searches like sudo-ldap.
It is recommended to replace the libnss-ldap package with
libnss-ldapd, a newer library which uses separate daemon (nslcd)
for all LDAP lookups. The replacement for libpam-ldap is
libpam-ldapd.
Note that libnss-ldapd recommends the NSS caching daemon (nscd)
which you should evaluate for suitability in your environment
before installing. As an alternative to nscd you can consider
unscd.
Further information is available in bugs #566351 (http://
bugs.debian.org/566351) and #545414 (http://bugs.debian.org/
545414) .
5.3. sieve service moving to its IANA-allocated port
The IANA port allocated for ManageSieve is 4190/tcp, and the old
port used by timsieved and other managesieve software in many
distributions (2000/tcp) is allocated for Cisco SCCP usage,
according to the IANA registry (http://www.iana.org/assignments/
port-numbers) .
Starting with the version 4.38 of the Debian netbase package, the
sieve service will be moved from port 2000 to port 4190 in the /
etc/services file.
Any installs which used the sieve service name instead of a
numeric port number will switch to the new port number as soon as
the services are restarted or reloaded, and in some cases,
immediately after /etc/services is updated.
This will affect Cyrus IMAP. This may also affect other
sieve-enabled software such as DoveCot.
In order to avoid downtime problems, mail cluster administrators
using Debian are urged to verify their Cyrus (and probably also
DoveCot) installs, and take measures to avoid services moving
from port 2000/tcp to port 4190/tcp by surprise in either servers
or clients.
It is worth noting that:
* /etc/services will only be automatically updated if you never
made any modifications to it. Otherwise, you will be
presented with a prompt by dpkg asking you about the changes.
* You can edit /etc/services and change the sieve port back to
2000 if you want (this is not recommended, though).
* You can edit /etc/cyrus.conf and any other relevant
configuration files for your mail/webmail cluster (e.g. on
the sieve web frontends) ahead of time to force them all to a
static port number.
* You can configure cyrus master to listen on both ports (2000
and 4190) at the same time, and thus avoid the problem
entirely. This also allows for a much more smooth migration
from port 2000 to port 4190.
5.4. Security status of web browsers
Debian 6.0 includes several browser engines which are affected by
a steady stream of security vulnerabilities. The high rate of
vulnerabilities and partial lack of upstream support in the form
of long term branches make it very difficult to support these
browsers with backported security fixes. Additionally, library
interdepencies make it impossible to update to newer upstream
releases. As such, browsers built upon the qtwebkit and khtml
engines are included in Squeeze, but not covered by full security
support. We will make an effort to track down and backport
security fixes, but in general these browsers should not be used
against untrusted websites.
For general web browser use we recommend browsers building on the
Mozilla xulrunner engine (Iceweasel and Iceape), browsers based
on the Webkit engine (e.g. Epiphany) or Chromium. Xulrunner has
had a history of good backportability for older releases over the
previous release cycles.
Chromium —while built upon the Webkit codebase— is a leaf
package, i.e. if backporting becomes no longer feasible, there's
still the possibility of upgrading to a later upstream release
(which is not possible for the webkit library itself).
Webkit is supported by upstream with a long term maintenance
branch.
5.5. KDE desktop
Squeeze is the first Debian release to ship with the full support
for the next generation KDE that is based on Qt 4. Most official
KDE applications are at version 4.4.5 with the exception of
kdepim that is at version 4.4.7. You can read the announcements
from the KDE Project (http://www.kde.org/announcements/) to learn
more about the changes.
5.5.1. Upgrading from KDE 3
KDE 3 Desktop Environment is no longer supported in Debian 6.0.
It will be automatically replaced by the new 4.4 series on
upgrade. As this is a major change, users should take some
precautions in order to ensure as smooth of an upgrade process as
possible.
Important
It is discouraged to upgrade while there is an active KDE 3
session on the system. Otherwise, the process might render the
running session dysfunctional with the possibility of data loss.
Upon the first login on the upgraded system, existing users will
be prompted with the Debian-KDE guided migration procedure called
kaboom which will assist in the process of migrating the user's
personal data and optionally backing up old KDE configuration.
For more information, visit the Kaboom homepage (http://
pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kaboom.html) .
While KDE 3 based desktop environment is no longer supported,
users can still install and use some individual KDE 3
applications since the core libraries and binaries of KDE 3
(kdelibs) and Qt 3 are still available in Debian 6.0. However,
please note that these applications might not be well integrated
with the new environment. What's more, neither KDE 3 nor Qt 3
will be supported in any form in the next Debian release so if
you are using them, you are strongly advised to port your
software to the new platform.
5.5.2. New KDE metapackages
As noted earlier, Debian 6.0 introduces a new set of KDE related
metapackages:
* You are strongly advised to install the kde-standard package
for normal desktop usage. kde-standard will pull in the KDE
Plasma Desktop (http://www.kde.org/workspaces/plasmadesktop/)
by default, and a selected set of commonly used applications.
* If you want a minimal desktop you can install the
kde-plasma-desktop package and manually pick the applications
you need. This is a rough equivalent of the kde-minimal
package as shipped in Debian 5.0.
* For small form factor devices, there is an alternative
environment called KDE Plasma Netbook (http://www.kde.org/
workspaces/plasmanetbook/) that can be installed with the
kde-plasma-netbook package. Plasma Netbook and Plasma Desktop
can live in the same system and the default can be configured
in System Settings (replacement of the former KControl).
* If you want a full set of official KDE applications, you have
the possibility to install the kde-full package. It will
install KDE Plasma Desktop by default.
5.6. GNOME desktop changes and support
There have been many changes in the GNOME desktop environment
from the version shipped in lenny to the version in squeeze, you
can find more information in the GNOME 2.30 Release Notes (http:/
/library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.30/) . Specific issues
are listed below.
5.6.1. GDM 2.20 and 2.30
The GNOME Display Manager (GDM), is kept at version 2.20 for
systems upgraded from lenny. This version will still be
maintained for the squeeze cycle but it is the last release to do
so. Newly installed systems will get GDM 2.30 instead, provided
by the gdm3 package. Because of incompatibilities between both
versions, this upgrade is not automatic, but it is recommended to
install gdm3 after the upgrade to squeeze. This should be done
from the console, or with only one open GNOME session. Note that
settings from GDM 2.20 will not be migrated. For a standard
desktop system, however, simply installing gdm3 should be enough.
5.6.2. Device and other administrative permissions
Specific permissions on devices are granted automatically to the
user currently logged on physically to the system: video and
audio devices, network roaming, power management, device
mounting. The cdrom, floppy, audio, video, plugdev and powerdev
groups are no longer useful. See the consolekit documentation for
more information.
Most graphical programs requiring root permissions now rely on
PolicyKit (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PolicyKit) to
do so, instead of gksu. The recommended way to give a user
administrative rights is to add it to the sudo group.
5.6.3. network-manager and ifupdown interaction
Upon upgrading the network-manager package, interfaces configured
in /etc/network/interfaces to use DHCP with no other options will
be disabled in that file, and handled by NetworkManager instead.
Therefore the ifup and ifdown commands will not work. These
interfaces can be managed using the NetworkManager frontends
instead, see the NetworkManager documentation (http://
live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/SystemSettings) .
Conversely, any interfaces configured in /etc/network/interfaces
with more options will be ignored by NetworkManager. This applies
in particular to wireless interfaces used during the installation
of Debian (see bug #606268 (http://bugs.debian.org/606268) ).
5.7. Graphics stack changes
There have been a number of changes to the X stack in Debian 6.0.
This section lists the most important and user-visible.
5.7.1. Obsolete Xorg drivers
The cyrix, imstt, sunbw2 and vga Xorg video drivers are no longer
provided. Users should switch to a generic such as vesa or fbdev
instead.
The old via driver was no longer maintained, and has been
replaced by the openchrome driver, which will be used
automatically after the upgrade.
The nv and radeonhd drivers are still present in this release,
but are deprecated. Users should consider the nouveau and radeon
drivers instead, respectively.
The calcomp, citron, digitaledge, dmc, dynapro, elo2300, fpit,
hyperpen, jamstudio, magellan, microtouch, mutouch, palmax,
spaceorb, summa, tek4957 and ur98 X input drivers have been
discontinued and are not included in this release. Users of these
devices might want to switch to a suitable kernel driver and the
evdev X driver. For many serial devices, the inputattach utility
allows attaching them to a Linux input device which can be
recognized by the evdev X driver.
5.7.2. Kernel mode setting
Kernel drivers for Intel (starting from i830), ATI/AMD (from the
original Radeon to the Radeon HD 5xxx “Evergreen” series) and for
NVIDIA graphics chipsets now support native mode setting.
5.7.3. Input device hotplug
The Xorg X server included in Debian 6.0 provides improved
support for hotplugging of input devices (mice, keyboards,
tablets, …). The old xserver-xorg-input-kbd and
xserver-xorg-input-mouse packages are replaced by
xserver-xorg-input-evdev, which requires a kernel with the
CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV option enabled. Additionally, some of the
keycodes produced by this driver differ from those traditionally
associated with the same keys. Users of programs like xmodmap and
xbindkeys will need to adjust their configurations for the new
keycodes.
5.7.4. X server “zapping”
Traditionally, the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace combination would kill the
X server. This combination is no longer active by default, but
can be re-enabled by reconfiguring the keyboard-configuration
package (system-wide), or using your desktop environment's
keyboard preferences application.
5.8. Munin web path change
For squeeze, the default location for the generated web content
of munin has been changed from /var/www/munin to /var/cache/munin
/www and therefore /etc/munin/munin.conf needs to be adapted on
upgrades, if it has been changed by the admin. If you are
upgrading, please read /usr/share/doc/munin/NEWS.Debian.gz.
5.9. Shorewall upgrade instructions
Users of the shorewall firewall should read the instructions at
http://www.shorewall.net/LennyToSqueeze.html (http://
www.shorewall.net/LennyToSqueeze.html) , also available as /usr/
share/doc/shorewall-doc/html/LennyToSqueeze.html in the
shorewall-doc package, upon upgrading to Debian 6.0.
Chapter 6. More information on Debian GNU/Linux
6.1. Further reading
Beyond these release notes and the installation guide, further
documentation on Debian GNU/Linux is available from the Debian
Documentation Project (DDP), whose goal is to create high-quality
documentation for Debian users and developers. Documentation,
including the Debian Reference, Debian New Maintainers Guide, and
Debian FAQ are available, and many more. For full details of the
existing resources see the Debian Documentation website (http://
www.debian.org/doc/) and the Debian Wiki website (http://
wiki.debian.org/)
Documentation for individual packages is installed into /usr/
share/doc/package. This may include copyright information, Debian
specific details and any upstream documentation.
6.2. Getting help
There are many sources of help, advice and support for Debian
users, but these should only be considered if research into
documentation of the issue has exhausted all sources. This
section provides a short introduction into these which may be
helpful for new Debian users.
6.2.1. Mailing lists
The mailing lists of most interest to Debian users are the
debian-user list (English) and other debian-user-language lists
(for other languages). For information on these lists and details
of how to subscribe see http://lists.debian.org/ (http://
lists.debian.org/) . Please check the archives for answers to
your question prior to posting and also adhere to standard list
etiquette.
6.2.2. Internet Relay Chat
Debian has an IRC channel dedicated to the support and aid of
Debian users located on the OFTC IRC network. To access the
channel, point your favorite IRC client at irc.debian.org and
join #debian.
Please follow the channel guidelines, respecting other users
fully. The guidelines are available at the Debian Wiki (http://
wiki.debian.org/DebianIRC) .
For more information on OFTC please visit the website (http://
www.oftc.net/) .
6.3. Reporting bugs
We strive to make Debian GNU/Linux a high quality operating
system, however that does not mean that the packages we provide
are totally free of bugs. Consistent with Debian's “open
development” philosophy and as a service to our users, we provide
all the information on reported bugs at our own Bug Tracking
System (BTS). The BTS is browseable at http://bugs.debian.org/
(http://bugs.debian.org/) .
If you find a bug in the distribution or in packaged software
that is part of it, please report it so that it can be properly
fixed for future releases. Reporting bugs requires a valid email
address. We ask for this so that we can trace bugs and developers
can get in contact with submitters should additional information
be needed.
You can submit a bug report using the program reportbug or
manually using email. You can read more about the Bug Tracking
System and how to use it by reading the reference documentation
(available at /usr/share/doc/debian if you have doc-debian
installed) or online at the Bug Tracking System (http://
bugs.debian.org/) .
6.4. Contributing to Debian
You do not need to be an expert to contribute to Debian. By
assisting users with problems on the various user support lists
(http://lists.debian.org/) you are contributing to the community.
Identifying (and also solving) problems related to the
development of the distribution by participating on the
development lists (http://lists.debian.org/) is also extremely
helpful. To maintain Debian's high quality distribution, submit
bugs (http://bugs.debian.org/) and help developers track them
down and fix them. If you have a way with words then you may want
to contribute more actively by helping to write documentation
(http://www.debian.org/doc/cvs) or translate (http://
www.debian.org/international/) existing documentation into your
own language.
If you can dedicate more time, you could manage a piece of the
Free Software collection within Debian. Especially helpful is if
people adopt or maintain items that people have requested for
inclusion within Debian. The Work Needing and Prospective
Packages database (http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/) details
this information. If you have an interest in specific groups then
you may find enjoyment in contributing to some of Debian's
subprojects which include ports to particular architectures,
Debian Jr. (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr/) and Debian
Med (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/) .
In any case, if you are working in the free software community in
any way, as a user, programmer, writer or translator you are
already helping the free software effort. Contributing is
rewarding and fun, and as well as allowing you to meet new people
it gives you that warm fuzzy feeling inside.
Appendix A. Managing your lenny system before the upgrade
This appendix contains information on how to make sure you can
install or upgrade lenny packages before you upgrade to squeeze.
This should only be necessary in specific situations.
A.1. Upgrading your lenny system
Basically this is no different than any other upgrade of lenny
you've been doing. The only difference is that you first need to
make sure your package list still contains references to lenny as
explained in Section A.2, “Checking your sources list”.
If you upgrade your system using a Debian mirror, it will
automatically be upgraded to the latest lenny point release.
A.2. Checking your sources list
If any of the lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list refer to
'stable', you are effectively already “using” squeeze. This might
not be what you want if you are not ready yet for the upgrade. If
you have already run apt-get update, you can still get back
without problems following the procedure below.
If you have also already installed packages from squeeze, there
probably is not much point in installing packages from lenny
anymore. In that case you will have to decide for yourself
whether you want to continue or not. It is possible to downgrade
packages, but that is not covered here.
Open the file /etc/apt/sources.list with your favorite editor (as
root) and check all lines beginning with deb http: or deb ftp:
for a reference to “stable”. If you find any, change stable to
lenny.
If you have any lines starting with deb file:, you will have to
check for yourself if the location they refer to contains an
lenny or a squeeze archive.
Important
Do not change any lines that begin with deb cdrom:. Doing so
would invalidate the line and you would have to run apt-cdrom
again. Do not be alarmed if a 'cdrom' source line refers to “
unstable”. Although confusing, this is normal.
If you've made any changes, save the file and execute
# apt-get update
to refresh the package list.
A.3. Upgrade legacy locales to UTF-8
If your system is localised and is using a locale that is not
based on UTF-8 you should strongly consider switching your system
over to using UTF-8 locales. In the past, there have been bugs
identified that manifest itself only when using a non-UTF-8
locale. On the desktop, such legacy locales are supported through
ugly hacks in the libraries internals, and we cannot decently
provide support for users who still use them.
To configure your system's locale you can run dpkg-reconfigure
locales. Ensure you select an UTF-8 locale when you are presented
with the question asking which locale to use as a default in the
system. In addition, you should review the locale settings of
your users and ensure that they do not have legacy locales
definitions in their configuration environment.
Appendix B. Contributors to the Release Notes
Many people helped with the release notes, including, but not
limited to
Adam Di Carlo, Andreas Barth, Andrei Popescu, Anne Bezemer, Bob
Hilliard, Charles Plessy, Christian Perrier, Daniel Baumann, Eddy
Petrișor, Emmanuel Kasper, Esko Arajärvi, Frans Pop, Giovanni
Rapagnani, Gordon Farquharson, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña,
Jens Seidel, Jonas Meurer, Josip Rodin, Justin B Rye, LaMont
Jones, Luk Claes, Martin Michlmayr, Michael Biebl, Moritz
Mühlenhoff, Noah Meyerhans, Noritada Kobayashi, Osamu Aoki, Peter
Green, Rob Bradford, Samuel Thibault, Simon Bienlein, Simon
Paillard, Stefan Fritsch, Steve Langasek, Steve McIntyre, Tobias
Scherer, Vincent McIntyre, and W. Martin Borgert.
This document has been translated into many languages. Many
thanks to the translators!
Index
A
Abiword, What's new in the distribution?
Apache, What's new in the distribution?
B
BIND, What's new in the distribution?
Blu-ray, CDs, DVDs and BDs
C
CD, CDs, DVDs and BDs
Cherokee, What's new in the distribution?
Courier, What's new in the distribution?
D
Debian Med, Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
Debian Science, Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
Dia, What's new in the distribution?
DocBook XML, Sources for this document
DVD, CDs, DVDs and BDs
E
Ekiga, What's new in the distribution?
Evolution, What's new in the distribution?
Exim, What's new in the distribution?
F
Firefox, What's new in the distribution?
G
GCC, What's new in the distribution?
GIMP, What's new in the distribution?
GNOME, What's new in the distribution?
GNUcash, What's new in the distribution?
GNUmeric, What's new in the distribution?
I
isohybrid, CDs, DVDs and BDs
K
KDE, What's new in the distribution?
KOffice, What's new in the distribution?
L
LDAP, LDAP support, LDAP support
LILO, Boot timing issues (waiting for root device)
Linux Standard Base, What's new in the distribution?
LXDE, What's new in the distribution?
M
Mozilla, What's new in the distribution?
MySQL, What's new in the distribution?
N
NeuroDebian, Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
neuroimaging research, Comprehensive support for neuroimaging
research
O
OpenOffice.org, What's new in the distribution?
OpenSSH, What's new in the distribution?
P
packages
ants, Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
approx, Obsolete packages
apt, Contributing upgrade reports, Preparing sources for APT,
Adding APT Internet sources, Adding APT sources for a local
mirror, Obsolete packages
apt-cacher, Obsolete packages
apt-cacher-ng, Obsolete packages
apt-proxy, Obsolete packages
aptitude, Package management, Make sure you have sufficient space
for the upgrade
autofs, Expected removals
autofs5, Expected removals
bash, Potential issues with diversions of /bin/sh
console-setup, Unified keyboard settings
consolekit, Device and other administrative permissions
dash, Potential issues with diversions of /bin/sh
db4.8-util, pam_userdb.so breakage with newer libdb
dblatex, Sources for this document
debian-goodies, Make sure you have sufficient space for the
upgrade
dhcp3, Expected removals
discover, Major changes
doc-debian, Reporting bugs
docbook-xsl, Sources for this document
evolution, Evolution
firmware-linux, Firmware moved to the non-free section
gdm, Deprecated components
gdm3, Deprecated components, GDM 2.20 and 2.30
gksu, Device and other administrative permissions
grub-pc, mdadm metadata format change requires recent Grub
icedove, What's new in the distribution?
iceweasel, What's new in the distribution?
initramfs-tools, Debug shell during boot using initrd, Upgrading
your kernel and related packages, Device enumeration
reordering, Boot timing issues (waiting for root device)
insserv, Dependency booting
isc-dhcp, Expected removals
kaboom, Upgrading from KDE 3
kde-full, New KDE metapackages
kde-minimal, New KDE metapackages
kde-plasma-desktop, New KDE metapackages
kde-plasma-netbook, New KDE metapackages
kde-standard, New KDE metapackages
kdelibs, Upgrading from KDE 3
kdepim, KDE desktop
kernel-package, Installing the kernel metapackage
keyboard-configuration, X server “zapping”
libnss-ldap, LDAP support, LDAP support
libnss-ldapd, LDAP support, LDAP support
libpam-ldap, LDAP support, LDAP support
libpam-ldapd, LDAP support, LDAP support
linux-base, Migration of disk drivers from IDE to PATA subsystem
linux-image-*, Upgrading your kernel and related packages
linux-image-2.6-686, Installing the kernel metapackage
linux-source-2.6, Installing the kernel metapackage
localepurge, Make sure you have sufficient space for the upgrade
madwifi-source, Expected removals
mdadm, mdadm metadata format change requires recent Grub
mksh, Potential issues with diversions of /bin/sh
mrtrix, Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
mysql-server-5.0, Obsolete packages
mysql-server-5.1, Obsolete packages
nessus, Obsolete packages
netbase, sieve service moving to its IANA-allocated port
network-manager, network-manager and ifupdown interaction
nipype, Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
nscd, LDAP support
odin, Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
openvas-client, Obsolete packages
openvas-server, Obsolete packages
plone, Obsolete packages
plymouth, Obsolete packages
popularity-contest, Make sure you have sufficient space for the
upgrade
postgresql-8.3, Obsolete packages
postgresql-8.4, Obsolete packages
psychopy, Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research
python2.4, Expected removals, Obsolete packages
python2.6, Expected removals, Obsolete packages
release-notes, Reporting bugs on this document
shorewall, Shorewall upgrade instructions
shorewall-doc, Shorewall upgrade instructions
splashy, Remove conflicting packages
sudo-ldap, LDAP support
sun-java5-bin, Obsolete packages
sun-java5-jre, Obsolete packages
sun-java6-jre, Obsolete packages
tinc, Prepare a safe environment for the upgrade
udev, Upgrading the kernel and udev, Upgrading your kernel and
related packages, Device enumeration reordering, Boot timing
issues (waiting for root device)
unscd, LDAP support
upgrade-reports, Contributing upgrade reports
usplash, Obsolete packages
xmlroff, Sources for this document
xserver-xorg-input-evdev, Input device hotplug
xserver-xorg-input-kbd, Input device hotplug
xserver-xorg-input-mouse, Input device hotplug
xserver-xorg-video-all, Obsolete packages
xserver-xorg-video-cyrix, Obsolete packages
xserver-xorg-video-i810, Obsolete packages
xserver-xorg-video-imstt, Obsolete packages
xserver-xorg-video-nsc, Obsolete packages
xserver-xorg-video-sunbw2, Obsolete packages
xserver-xorg-video-vga, Obsolete packages
xsltproc, Sources for this document
PHP, What's new in the distribution?
Pidgin, What's new in the distribution?
Postfix, What's new in the distribution?
PostgreSQL, What's new in the distribution?
T
Thunderbird, What's new in the distribution?
Tomcat, What's new in the distribution?
X
Xfce, What's new in the distribution?
Glossary
ACPI
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface
ALSA
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
APM
Advanced Power Management
BD
Blu-ray Disc
CD
Compact Disc
CD-ROM
Compact Disc Read Only Memory
DHCP
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
DNS
Domain Name System
DVD
Digital Versatile Disc
GIMP
GNU Image Manipulation Program
GNU
GNU's Not Unix
GPG
GNU Privacy Guard
IDE
Integrated Drive Electronics
LDAP
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
LILO
LInux LOader
LSB
Linux Standard Base
LVM
Logical Volume Manager
MTA
Mail Transport Agent
NFS
Network File System
NIC
Network Interface Card
NIS
Network Information Service
OSS
Open Sound System
RAID
Redundant Array of Independent Disks
RPC
Remote Procedure Call
SATA
Serial Advanced Technology Attachment
SSL
Secure Sockets Layer
TLS
Transport Layer Security
USB
Universal Serial Bus
UUID
Universally Unique Identifier
VGA
Video Graphics Array
WPA
Wi-Fi Protected Access