After reading Wolfgang's blog entry on how easy it is to upgrade a Debian installation (and I recommend The Debian User to any and all Debian and Ubuntu users), I decided to do it myself.

I have a testing hard drive (one of three I can easily swap in and out of my Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client) that began as a Debian Etch Xfce box and recently got all GNOME added. Now I'm doing the easy upgrade from Etch (stable) to Lenny (testing).

As Wolfgang describes, it's easy.

As root (I opened a root terminal), go into /etc/apt/sources.list and change all Etch references to Lenny. Then do:

# apt-get update

# apt-get dist-upgrade

And now I'm watching (with about half an eye) all the newish apps coming onto the system (OpenOffice 2.2.1 to replace 2.0 is coming in now).

They say that Ubuntu is more akin to Debian unstable (Sid) than testing (Lenny), which makes Etch an ultra-stable choice. But I'll give Lenny a spin. This drive is set up as a single-boot system with a separate /home partition, so a full replacement of the OS can be done at any time without needing to replace any files I have in that partition (currently nothing I don't have backed up elsewhere).

Note on the process: I'm doing this on a non-critical drive in a non-critical box. I'm a lot more careful with a system that I depend on daily. As always, backing up user data is the first thing you should be doing before any major upgrade.

A couple hours later: The Lenny upgrade is finished. And the box is rebooting now -- the new kernel is booting fine. Everything's a bit smaller -- menus, icons -- in both GNOME and Xfce (the same thing happened to me with Xubuntu 7.10). It looks more like Slackware does on this box. I'll have to see how I like it. I don't know if the resolution is higher than I'm used to ... or all the desktop fonts are smaller.

Font fix for Etch-to-Lenny upgrade:

Here's how I got my GNOME desktop looking like it "used to," meaning with fonts big enough for my 1024 x 768 screen resolution. Under System -- Preferences -- Appearance, click on Fonts and change everything from 10 to 12. That's it.

I had to do it all over again in Xfce. In the menu, go to Settings -- Desktop Settings. then click on the Behavior tab. Uncheck "Use system font size." For Custom font size, type in 12. That takes care of the desktop, but not the menu and applications. For that, go to Settings -- User Interface Settings and change the font from Sans 9 to Sans 12. And to complete the job, go to Settings -- Window Manager Settings and change the font from Sans Bold 9 to Sans Bold 12. Both of these settings can also be accessed from the Xfce Settings Manager.

Looking back on this install ... and the one after it: It's worth mentioning here that I didn't have this font-size problem the next day when I installed Lenny on the $0 Laptop, the Gateway Solo 1450. That computer only has GNOME (it's a standard Debian install), and all fonts looked fine in Lenny. And I've mentioned before that the way fonts are handled in the Web browsers in Debian causes them to look better on LCD screens than CRTs, hence everything is better on a laptop (and there are ways to fix the fonts for CRTs, although to tell you the truth, I've gotten used to them, so I no longer do this fix).

But there's another problem: I've been adding software (including digiKam, which brought a lot of libraries along with it), and now I'm just about out of room in my / partition. I'll see if I can shrink the /home partition and then expand /. I'm using my go-to live CD for this, Parted Magic. So far it let me shrink the /home partition at the end of the drive and move the swap partition (which for some reason is between the two).

I'm waiting for Parted Magic to do its thing before I try to increase the size of the root partition.

Brief pause to ponder: Gparted is such a great tool -- another example of the power of free, open-source software. I never owned a proprietary disk-partioning program -- and I'll never have to buy one.

How much disk space for / ? Debian at least tells you how much space to allocate for your root partition. The recommendation is 5 GB for a desktop system. I'd say that's about right. I only had 4 GB, and I was running out of space. Of course, that's with Xfce and GNOME. It depends, of course, on how much additional software you want to pack into Debian. I guess it depends on the size of your drive. I'm working with 14.4 GB drives. Better to have something bigger and have a lot of extra space; 10 GB seems like a nice round number.

Back to partitioning: I was able to shrink the /home partition and move the swap partition. Both of those were in an extended partition, so then I shrunk that. Now I'm growing the root partition that starts at the front of the drive. We'll see it Debian Lenny boots when this is all done.

As it stands, I now have a 7.12 GB root partition, a 486 MB swap partition and a 5.85 GB /home partition. That leaves plenty of room for adding software and enough room for data as well.

But will Debian boot?

Yes, it did.

That was the most radical repartitioning I've ever done to a drive on which I actually kept the current operating system intact.

It's "so far, so good" with Debian Lenny. Once again, it just works. Thanks to all who work on the Debian project as well as all the many pieces that go into it.

Best thing about Lenny: I really like GNOME 2.20. Everything looks cleaner. Applications seem quicker, especially Ephiphany (which I find myself using quite a bit when I'm in Debian).

Next job: Upgrading from Etch to Lenny on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) and $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt).