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Upgrade all the way from squeeze :D

Posted: 10 Jul 2020, 09:25
by stasheck
Hi guys,
I think it's quite undoable, but a friend of mine asked me to upgrade his B3 - which was fine, until I discovered it's still running Squeeze (with original B3 'elvin' distro) O_o

Is there any sane way to go up to Buster?

I have no idea what's installed and configured on this system; I can fix stuff that breaks, but would prefer NOT to install it from scratch and then hear every few days or so "hey, I had this software here, where did it go" :/

Re: Upgrade all the way from squeeze :D

Posted: 10 Jul 2020, 10:45
by MouettE
It's theorically possible BUT you will probably face a number of problems you'll have to fix yourself. The hardest part will be squeeze -> jessie because you'll need to remove all the excito packages first. Jessie was the first one I did and it had a couple of issues I never fixed beacause we moved to stretch quickly.It's probably going to take a lot of time (install from scratch would be much quicker).

If you want I can write a quick how-to for this migration (I would start from a fresh excito install and upgrade to buster) if you're interested.

Re: Upgrade all the way from squeeze :D

Posted: 10 Jul 2020, 15:38
by Gordon
If I remember correctly, in the original B3 software literally everything was installed as a dependency of the bubba packages, including ssh and the kernel. Unless you protect at least those two packages you'll effectively brick the B3 software wise.

Just out of interest, is there anything specific you want to keep from the current system? It's worth noting that many of the config files from Squeeze won't work anyway with current versions of e.g. samba, postfix and dovecot.

Re: Upgrade all the way from squeeze :D

Posted: 17 Jul 2020, 14:32
by stasheck
As I'm saying, it's not my system, it's my friend's. I'm not sure what's installed there, it was installed 4-5 years ago and never updated (LAN with NAT, so not THAT bad).

I guess he likes Excito interface, any way to keep that?

Re: Upgrade all the way from squeeze :D

Posted: 19 Jul 2020, 14:04
by Gordon
Depends on whether you (and he) want to stick to Debian and how much work you want to put into it. I maintain a working port of the original interface that I translate into Gentoo packages. There is no reason why my patches to the original software would not work if you (partially) applied them to run with other distros. It might not always be completely obvious though which changes were made to match Gentoo system layout and should either be skipped or altered to meet some other distro (or systemd init) requirement.

Re: Upgrade all the way from squeeze :D

Posted: 16 Sep 2020, 11:10
by samlrs
As I'm saying, it's not my system, it's my friend's. I'm not sure what's installed there, it was installed 4-5 years ago and never updated (LAN with NAT, so not THAT bad).

I guess he likes Excito interface, any way to keep that?
I think there is no point in keeping it. A better way is to update it all the way from scratch
oops, didn't mean to edit