Etch to Lenny ain't so bad

The upgrade process is more involved than I remember Sarge to Etch being, but overall not bad.  An abridged version of the Debian upgrade notes follows:

1. Run aptitude, clear any pending actions
2. Run dpkg –audit, look for packages needing attention
3. Make sure the kernel version is equal to or greater than 2.6.18
4. Run aptitude search ‘i~M’ to see what packages are marked as automatically installed
5. Run aptitude unmarkauto packagename on whatever you don’t want to be uninstalled
6. Change ‘etch’ in sources.list to ‘lenny’
7. Add contrib and non-free if you need firmware drivers for your network card (like my bnx2)
8. Run ‘script -t 2>~/upgrade-lenny.time -a ~/upgrade-lenny.script’ to create a record of the install in case things go pear-shaped.
9. Run aptitude update
10. Run aptitude -y -s -f –with-recommends dist-upgrade to see how much space you’ll need
11. Update aptitude, aptitude install aptitude
12. Run aptitude once to trigger something or other that is detailed in the official doc, aptitude search “?false”
13. Run aptitude upgrade to upgrade some stuff that may need to be updated before doing the next step
14. Run aptitude dist-upgrade
15. (optional) Install xen-hypervisor-3.2-1-amd64, if dpkg complains about not enough space, uninstall the package, uninstall whatever old kernels you don’t need any more, then try it again.
16. Reboot.

If all went well, that’s it, you’re done.  If not, and apparently there are a number of things that can go wrong, check the doc linked above and scroll down.  Matter of fact, you should probably read the document first and just use this as an abridged version to have on hand when you do the upgrade.