Today, while updating my Debian Squeeze, after running

sudo aptitude update

As with the post of How to upgrade Debian Etch to Lenny, I actually know this may be know by a lot of people already, but here is how I did it, and if you ever forget can come here and remember it.

First edit your sources.list

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Hi, I have just upgraded from Debian Lenny to Debian Squeeze, and so far so good, everything is working great as I am used to since I start using Debian, when Etch was in testing.

Since then I have never reinstalled my Debian machine, I have installed Etch Testing that day, and then upgraded to Lenny and now to Squeeze, I have even change the machine and only disconnect the disk from the old one and connect it to the new one, and everything continue to work the same, let me tell you that is not a server and it is my Desktop PC.

We finally have Lenny as Stable that happened yesterday and now the gave the news in the official site of this great Linux distribution.

Lenny official release news

Also Check out this notes

Where you can see that the new testing Debian is now code named "squeeze", you can start upgrading your Etch versions to Lenny

Upgrade Debian (Old stable) Etch to Lenny (Stable)

You may have been using useradd or adduser to add new users or create new accounts in your Linux powered PC.

And sometimes you may have wonder about the difference between the two of them, well, the difference is also different depending on what version you are using.

Debian / Ubuntu

Normally you know which version of a given distro you are running if you are on your machine, but what if you are on a rented server, or a friend's machine.

If you want to know which version of Debian or Ubuntu you are running, you can always check the /etc/apt/sources.list there you will see the version you are running but a better way is to run this on a terminal:

lsb_release -a

Debian and Ubuntu uses for visudo, crontab and other similar applications the default text editor, you want to change it use the update-alternatives command.

It is as easy as, run this on a terminal window.

Debian uses .deb binary packages and you manually install and uninstall them using dpkg tool.

dpkg has lots of options but maybe the most important or used ones are:

-i

Installs and configures a package

-r

Removes the package but keeps the configuration files on your systems, thus you may reinstall it later and does not need to configure it again

-p

Purges a package, meaning it will remove the package and also all configuration files

How to use it