Upgrading to Debian Lenny

Today, 24th of October 2008, i’ve upgraded my laptop from debian etch to lenny.

Starting the upgrade procedure is as simple as that:

First, edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change all occurences of etch (or stable) to lenny

Then

apt-get update

apt-get dist-upgrade

And then waiting for some hours.

During configuration, you will be asked a question from time to time. Especially, whether you want to keep your customized conf-files or not.

Then it happend on my system, that configuration of docbook-xml and gnome failed with this error:

Installing docbook-xml (4.5-5) ...

update-xmlcatalog: error: entity already registered

dpkg: error processing docbook-xml (--configure):

subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

This problem is known as bug #482140. You can find the bug log here http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=482140

To fix it right away, just do the following:

dpkg --purge docbook-xml

dpkg -i docbook-xml

You’ll have to use dpkg for this, because apt would solve all dependencies when you try to purge docbook-xml and delete a lot of files you want to keep.

After that, finish the upgrade process:

apt-get dist-upgrade

This did it for me. Now, I’m happy with lenny!