Dear Terrence,

On 2/10/07, jtd wrote:

It will. But there is a very small chance that u may have to intervene manually, usually with dpkg -i --force-overwrite <some package>. Or even manually opening the deb and copying required files if u are drunk. ( i am sober right now).

Thx for the warning. :-) And how do you know you are sober? ;-)

You could but it could be a very very long night .

After going through the Debian Site. I am doing following

aptitude upgrade aptitude

This has downloaded about 55MB of packages.

After this step and a reboot

I am now doing

aptitude upgrade xserver-xfree86

Hope this will upgrade the X11 and related packages. Now it is downloading about 100 MB worth of packages.

Will keep my fingers crossed. :-)

Thx for all your help. With regards,

On Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:44:26 +0530, jtd said:

On Saturday 10 February 2007 19:49, Dinesh Shah wrote:

...

# apt-get dist-upgrade Selects 737 upgraded, 345 newly installed, 55 to remove and 2 not upgraded and will download 667MB. :-(

Do you think my system will survive this upgrade?

It should. Please file an installation bug report on debian-installer if things do not work out, doing so should get you very expert help in unjamming your system.

It will. But there is a very small chance that u may have to intervene manually, usually with dpkg -i --force-overwrite <some

You should not do this unless you know exactly what you are doing. Before you force things in, it is easier to unjam the system, after forcing something in, all bets are off.

package>. Or even manually opening the deb and copying required files if u are drunk. ( i am sober right now).

I have never, ever seen that to be required; and one of my machines was installed in 1996, and has been dist-upgraded ever since. I've replaced the motherboard, and hard drives , power supply, graphics and sound cards, and yes, even the case, but each has been piecemeal :)

...

Is there any way I can selectively upgrade only important packages like X11?

You could but it could be a very very long night . http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/en/quick-reference.txt should help to do the above and bail out if neccessary.

Partial upgrades are supported, but only on a best effort basis. At this point, I think too many things have changed for a partial upgrade to remain partial -- I think you'll end up with a large upload, and a mostly etch machine, but different enough that bugs on your box might not be reproducible by other people, and thus harder to fix.

manoj

Hi!

On 2/10/07, Rony wrote:

Etch ran on my P4 2.4 GHz. with 256 MB RAM and Intel 845 GEBV2. You got a better config. :)

Oh yes, it does run. However, now the system has barely survived. GNOME is dead so is GDM.

Now starting X using startx with .xinitrc with "startkde".

Now will try complete dist-upgrade. I hope I will be able to survive MTNL bill after such heavy downloads. ;-)

One thing is sure. If you have to have up-to-date Debian system, you need to have good bandwidth with unlimited downloads. :-)

Rony.

WIll update further once I do complete dist-upgrade. With regards,