Upgrading notes

On this page you can find some tips for upgrading your grml/Debian system.

Just run ‘aptitude update ; aptitude install grml’ to update the core grml packages. As usual run ‘aptitude update ; aptitude dist-upgrade’ to upgrade your whole grml/Debian system.

Before reporting bugs to the grml-team please take a look at http://bugs.debian.org/$PACKAGE_CAUSING_PROBLEMS and for grml-packages at grml.org/bugs/. Some tips may be found in the grml-user mailinglist archive as well.

We recommend to use aptitude instead of apt-get. See Joey's mail for reasons why you want to use aptitude.

• Update the ‘grml’ package before doing an upgrade of other packages. So just run ‘aptitude update ; aptitude install grml’ and continue afterwards with ‘aptitude upgrade’ and/or ‘aptitude dist-upgrade’
• Read the output of apt-listbugs to be informed about possible (serious) problems of packages (enabled by default on grml).
• Read the output of apt-listchanges to be informed about changes in packages (enabled by default on grml).
• Set EXITSTATUS=’101’ in /etc/policy-rc.d.conf on your grml system if you want to prevent packages from (re-)starting initscripts/daemons. Don’t forget to set it to ‘0’ again after upgrading has finished.

If you get something like:

Starting $PACKAGE: $DAEMON invoke-rc.d: initscript $PACKAGE, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing $PACKAGE (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 $PACKAGE
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

the initscript of $PACKAGE failed to start up. Try to find the reason why this happend and report it to the package maintainer. To fix the issue temporarly either run:

chmod -x /etc/init.d/$PACKAGE
apt-get install $PACKAGE
chmox +x /etc/init.d/$PACKAGE

or:

vim /var/lib/dpkg/info/$PACKAGE.p{re,ost}inst

and deactivate the relevant sequence in the script (like the invoke-rc.d call for example):

if [ -x "`which invoke-rc.d 2>/dev/null`" ]; then
        invoke-rc.d $PACKAGE start || exit 0
else
        /etc/init.d/$PACKAGE start || exit 0
fi

If you get something like:

Preparing to replace $PACKAGE 1:7.0.17 (using .../$PACKAGE_1%3a7.0.20_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement $PACKAGE ...
Preparing to replace $PACKAGE 1:7.0.17 (using .../x11-common_1%3a7.0.20_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement $PACKAGE ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/$PACKAGE_1%3a7.0.20_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/X11R6/bin', which is also in package $FOOBAR
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/$PACKAGE_1%3a7.0.20_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/X11R6/bin', which is also in package $FOOBAR

then $PACKAGE tries to overwrite a file which is part of another package as well. Either the package has to use dpkg-divert/update-alternatives inside the maintainer script or has to conflict with the package providing the same files. Anyway it’s to be considered as a bug. Please report the problem to the maintainer of $PACKAGE. If you can’t wait for a fix a workaround is to run:

dpkg -i --force-overwrite ~deb/$PACKAGE.deb