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One of Debian's goals is to provide a consistent upgrade path and a secure upgrade process. We always do our best to make upgrading to new releases a smooth procedure. In case there's some important note to add to the upgrade process, the packages will alert the user, and often provide a solution to a possible problem.
You should also read the Release Notes document that describes the details of
specific upgrades. It is available on the Debian website at http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/releasenotes
and is also shipped on the Debian CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs.
One could simply execute an anonymous ftp call to a Debian archive, then peruse the directories until one finds the desired file, and then fetch it, and finally install it using dpkg. Note that dpkg will install upgrade files in place, even on a running system. Sometimes, a revised package will require the installation of a newly revised version of another package, in which case the installation will fail until/unless the other package is installed.
Many people find this approach much too time-consuming, since Debian evolves so quickly -- typically, a dozen or more new packages are uploaded every week. This number is larger just before a new major release. To deal with this avalanche, many people prefer to use a more automated method. Several different packages are available for this purpose:
aptitude is the recommended package manager for Debian GNU/Linux
systems, and is described in aptitude,
Section 8.1.3.
Before you can use aptitude to make an upgrade, you'll have to
edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file to set it up. If you wish to
upgrade to the latest stable version of Debian, you'll probably want to use a
source like this one:
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib
You can replace ftp.us.debian.org (the mirror in the United States) with the
name of a faster Debian mirror near you. See the mirror list at http://www.debian.org/mirror/list
for more information.
Or you can use the redirector service httpredir.debian.org which aims to solve the problem of choosing a Debian mirror. It uses the geographic location of the user and other information to choose the best mirror that can serve the files. To take advantage of it use a source like this one:
http://httpredir.debian.org/debian stable main contrib
More details on this can be found in the sources.list(5) manual
page.
To update your system from the command line, run
aptitude update
followed by
aptitude full-upgrade
Answer any questions that might come up, and your system will be upgraded.
Note that aptitude is not the recommended tool for doing upgrades
from one Debian GNU/Linux release to another. Use apt-get
instead. For upgrades between releases you should read the Release
Notes. This document describes in detail the recommended steps for
upgrades from previous releases as well as known issues you should consider
before upgrading.
For details, see the manual page aptitude(8), and the file
/usr/share/aptitude/README.
An alternative to aptitude is apt-get which is an
APT-based command-line tool (described previously in APT, Section 8.1.2).
apt-get, the APT-based command-line tool for handling packages,
provides a simple, safe way to install and upgrade packages.
To use apt-get, edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file
to set it up, just as for aptitude, Section
9.1.1.
Then run
apt-get update
followed by
apt-get dist-upgrade
Answer any questions that might come up, and your system will be upgraded. See
also the apt-get(8) manual page, as well as APT, Section 8.1.2.
If you want to use CDs/DVDs/BDs to install packages, you can use
apt-cdrom. For details, please see the Release Notes, section
"Adding APT sources from optical media".
Please note that when you get and install the packages, you'll still have them
kept in your /var directory hierarchy. To keep your partition from
overflowing, remember to delete extra files using apt-get clean
and apt-get autoclean, or to move them someplace else (hint: use
apt-move).
This Perl script, and its (optional) manager program called
mirror-master, can be used to fetch user-specified parts of a
directory tree from a specified host via anonymous FTP.
mirror is particularly useful for downloading large volumes of
software. After the first time files have been downloaded from a site, a file
called .mirrorinfo is stored on the local host. Changes to the
remote file system are tracked automatically by mirror, which
compares this file to a similar file on the remote system and downloads only
changed files.
The mirror program is generally useful for updating local copies
of remote directory trees. The files fetched need not be Debian files. (Since
mirror is a Perl script, it can also run on non-Unix systems.)
Though the mirror program provides mechanisms for excluding files
with names matching user-specified strings, this program is most useful when
the objective is to download whole directory trees, rather than selected
packages.
No. Packages can be upgraded in place, even in running systems. Debian has a start-stop-daemon program that is invoked to stop, then restart running process if necessary during a package upgrade.
No. If you have downloaded the files to your disk then after you have installed the packages, you can remove them from your system, e.g. by running aptitude clean.
Passing the --log-option to dpkg makes
dpkg log status change updates and actions. It logs both the
dpkg-invokation (e.g.
2005-12-30 18:10:33 install hello 1.3.18 2.1.1-4
) and the results (e.g.
2005-12-30 18:10:35 status installed hello 2.1.1-4
) If you'd like to log all your dpkg invocations (even those done
using frontends like aptitude), you could add
log /var/log/dpkg.log
to your /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg. Be sure the created logfile gets
rotated periodically. If you're using logrotate, this can be
achieved by creating a file /etc/logrotate.d/dpkg with the
following lines
/var/log/dpkg {
missingok
notifempty
}
More details on dpkg logging can be found in the
dpkg(1) manual page.
aptitude logs the package installations, removals, and upgrades
that it intends to perform to /var/log/aptitude. Note that the
results of those actions are not recorded in this file!
Another way to record your actions is to run your package management session
within the script(1) program.
Yes. You can use cron-apt; this tool updates the system at
regular intervals using a cron job. By default it just updates the package
list and downloads new packages, but without installing them.
Note: Automatic upgrade of packages is NOT recommended in testing or unstable systems as this might bring unexpected behaviour and remove packages without notice.
If you have more than one Debian machine on your network, it is useful to use
apt-cacher to keep all of your Debian systems up-to-date.
apt-cacher reduces the bandwidth requirements of Debian mirrors by
restricting the frequency of Packages, Releases and Sources file updates from
the back end and only doing a single fetch for any file, independently of the
actual request from the proxy. apt-cacher automatically builds a
Debian HTTP mirror based on requests which pass through the proxy.
Of course, you can get the same benefit if you are already using a standard caching proxy and all your systems are configured to use it.
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The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ
version 8.1, 28 August 2016