Upgrade to Excalibur

Important: usrmerge must be installed before initiating an upgrade from Daedalus to Excalibur. For example:

• apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
• apt-get install usrmerge

For more information, see this UsrMerge announcement.

Also, please do read the Devuan Excalibur Release Notes which detail significant changes between the previous and current release.

This document describes how to upgrade to Devuan Excalibur from an existing Devuan Daedalus system. This should not be used for migrations from Debian.

For best results during an upgrade scenario, shutting down all non-essential software is recommended. For example, one might choose to shut down the X graphical environment, and type the upgrade commands below from a virtual terminal (Control-Alt-F1 through Control-Alt-F6).

Note that skipping releases is not supported. Upgrade to Devuan Daedalus, and ensure that the existing installation is fully up to date before proceeding.

root@devuan:~# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Devuan excalibur requires usrmerge.

root@devuan:~# apt-get install usrmerge

Next change /etc/apt/sources.list so that it points to the Excalibur repositories.

root@devuan:~# editor /etc/apt/sources.list

Modify sources.list to look like the one provided. Comment out all other lines.

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-updates main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security main
#deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-backports main

Note that all software shipped with Devuan in the main component is free software. But if needed, non-free software is also available. Just add the non-free-firmware, non-free and contrib components to the appropriate line(s) in /etc/apt/sources.list as required:

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur main non-free-firmware non-free contrib

Now update the package lists from the Excalibur repository.

root@devuan:~# apt-get update

If xscreensaver is running, kill it now as it needs to be stopped before it can be upgraded.

root@devuan:~# killall xscreensaver

Now perform the upgrade. It is worth doing this in two stages: upgrade and dist-upgrade

root@devuan:~# apt-get upgrade
root@devuan:~# apt-get dist-upgrade

In the event of any package failures, fix the failed packages then start the upgrade again.

root@devuan:~# apt-get -f install
root@devuan:~# apt-get dist-upgrade

It is usually worth removing packages that were orphaned by the upgrade process and old package archives.

root@devuan:~# apt-get autoremove --purge
root@devuan:~# apt-get autoclean

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