Time to upgrade Debian?

I decided today that it was time to upgrade my Debian Distrobution!

I installed Stretch on 4 Apr 2017 and it has been working quite will for me.

I did not really have a great need to upgrade. Stretch will be fully supported until 2020 and there will be long term support until 2022.

But I am feeling like doing some testing and the transitional freeze is scheduled for 12 Jan 2019.

The upgrade is amazingly simple, and this is one of the reasons that I use Debian. I used Fedora for a long time and upgrading was a nightmare. I am sure it is better now, but I also prefer the Debian packaging system over the RPM system.

Well on to the upgrade.

The most important part of the upgrade is make sure that you are up to date with your current version (Stretch in this case).

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

If you haven't upgraded in awhile (and shame on you if you haven't) it can take quite a bit of time.

After the upgrade you might want to check on the size of your /var/cache/apt/archives/ partition.

The upgrade on my system resulted in 1297 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 897 not upgraded.

The upgrade did fail on one file, and I had to download apt_1.7.0_amd64.deb by hand from Debian packages and install it with dpk -i.

apt-cache policy libc-bin

I have also had some font issues with chrome. It looks pretty bad, but then I can always switch to Iceweasle.

While it is not bad enough for me to revert back to stretch, it is quite annoying.