Upgrade Debian 7 (Wheezy) to Debian 8 (Jessie)

After almost 24 months of constant development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name “Jessie”), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.

“Jessie” ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides many exciting features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in “Jessie”.

Before Upgrading

1) You need check the know issues in Debian 8

2) Backup of your data on the server you are going to upgrade

3) Arrange downtime with all the required teams

Upgrade Process

First you need to make sure your existing debian system is up-to-date using the following commands

#apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Now you need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file

#vi /etc/apt/sources.list

Change the following lines From

deb http://debian.osuosl.org/debian wheezy main non-free contrib
deb-src http://debian.osuosl.org/debian wheezy main non-free contrib

deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

# wheezy-updates, previously known as ‘volatile’
deb http://debian.osuosl.org/debian wheezy-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.osuosl.org/debian wheezy-updates main contrib non-free

To

deb http://debian.osuosl.org/debian jessie main non-free contrib
deb-src http://debian.osuosl.org/debian jessie main non-free contrib

deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free

# jessie-updates, previously known as ‘volatile’
deb http://debian.osuosl.org/debian jessie-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.osuosl.org/debian jessie-updates main contrib non-free

Save and exit the file

Update source list

#apt-get update

Update minimal base system

#apt-get upgrade

Update rest of the system

#apt-get dist-upgrade

Finally you can reboot your server

Once restarted you can check the current version using the following command

lsb_release -a

or

cat /etc/debian_version

You can check the kernel version using the following command

uname -a

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2 thoughts on “Upgrade Debian 7 (Wheezy) to Debian 8 (Jessie)

  1. Hi,
    Thanks for the help.
    Just a question: for a while I’ve been using aptitude instead of apt-xxx tools set, but I see these are sitll been mentioned like in this case. My question is, Is there a real difference about what to use? Specifically for this issue, is one better than the other?

  2. I actually do a little more just to be sure, like making sure that everything is downloaded before I start actually applying packages, and making sure any unmet dependencies are handled.

    apt-get update
    apt-get install -f
    apt-get dist-upgrade -dy
    apt-get dist-upgrade -dy
    apt-get upgrade -y
    apt-get install -f
    apt-get upgrade -y
    apt-get install -f
    apt-get dist-upgrade -y
    apt-get install -f
    apt-get dist-upgrade -y
    apt-get install -f

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