Upgrading Debian Distribution

Thanks I will try that!!

Echowarrior108

device: pogoplug-pro v3

Currently running:
Linux version 5.15.158-oxnas-tld-2 (root@tldDebian) (gcc (Debian 12.2.0-14) 12.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.40) #2 SMP PREEMPT Sun May 12 18:45:05 PDT 2024
Debian 12.6

got it done, did not help for Trixie, just gonna give it some time. be safe my friend!

Echowarrior108

device: pogoplug-pro v3

Currently running:
Linux version 5.15.158-oxnas-tld-2 (root@tldDebian) (gcc (Debian 12.2.0-14) 12.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.40) #2 SMP PREEMPT Sun May 12 18:45:05 PDT 2024
Debian 12.6

Chiming in, Upgraded to Trixie on one of my M300s so far with no problems on the 6.15.2 kernel.
Output from apt is a bit different now, among a few other things, but nothing crazy happened.
Upgrade went swimmingly on my two amd64 boxes as well.

According to the release notes, I did see a chilling note:

Quote

5.1.3. Last release for armel
From trixie, armel is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no Debian installer for armel systems, and only Raspberry Pi 1, Zero, and Zero W are supported by the kernel packages.
Users running armel systems can upgrade to trixie, provided their hardware is supported by the kernel packages, or they use a third-party kernel.
trixie will be the last release for the armel architecture. Debian recommends, where possible, reinstalling armel systems as armhf or arm64, or retiring the hardware.

I think this means it's going to be time to start looking into Gentoo images early to ease transition. It's technically the last distro to still have support after this, if what I'm reading is correct. Past this, it's been a fun run. I pray Gentoo keeps support until past 2027.
armel will still probably exist in the unofficial ports, someone will keep it alive, like with m68k and the like. but, the countdown to what can be considered the official end has now started.

More than ever, this means that the popularity-contest package should be installed on fresh systems, meaning, it should be set up inside the Trixie rootfs whenever that gets made. This should give clear numbers via the debian popcon graphs to how many active trixie armel users there are if people do not want to do an in-place upgrade... assuming most are coming from this forum, as I'd expect.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2025 02:40AM by sudos.

sudos Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think this means it's going to be time to start
> looking into Gentoo images early to ease
> transition. It's technically the last distro to
> still have support after this, if what I'm reading
> is correct. Past this, it's been a fun run. I
> pray Gentoo keeps support until past 2027.
> armel will still probably exist in the unofficial
> ports, someone will keep it alive, like with m68k
> and the like. but, the countdown to what can be
> considered the official end has now started.

OpenWrt still supports kirkwood devices and likely will until they are no longer supported by the kernel. Although OpenWrt is not a traditional Linux distro, it does provide sufficient packages to enable use as a file server.

https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/

Quote

The Debian 13 life cycle encompasses five years: the initial three years of full Debian support, until August 9th, 2028.

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I imagine Debian Ports will be an option even after that.

1000001101000 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I imagine Debian Ports will be an option even
> after that.


Could you elaborate a bit more on this? Thanks.

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For a lot of the architectures that are dropped by the main Debian project there are still packages and even some installer images available through https://www.ports.debian.org/

It depends on what they decide to do when the time comes. For architectures like ppc, m68k, alpha etc you can still run a version of Debian Testing with the packages etc maintained there. I've used them to run Debian on a PPC-based Terastation are recently as Debian 10/Linux 4.19.... I should probably see if I can get that to boot a modern kernel again one of these days.

Hopefully they will still host/update packages via that mechanism for a while provided the kernel continues to support those architectures.

Hi all,

I upgraded my NSA325 from deb 11 to 12 (Bookworm) as described. First I ran into some problems regarding UsrMerge needed, but overcame that and the upgrade seemed to go well.

Updated InitRamFS

Then my network connection didn't seem to work, so I checked out the point concerning the naming of eth0 and added 'rename /end0=eth0
'

Still no ethernet
Couldn't 'apt-get install orphan-sysvinit-scripts' and 'apt-get install debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring' but rebooted.

Now I'm stuck with a flashing orange red and the system is not booting. Any idea on what the issue is? I have a serial cable ready, attached to a rpi3 via usb,

Bobby,

> Now I'm stuck with a flashing orange red and the
> system is not booting. Any idea on what the issue
> is? I have a serial cable ready, attached to a
> rpi3 via usb,

Please create a new thread for this problem. This thread is about general info for upgrading Debian.

In the new thread, post the entire serial console boot log.

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FWIW, upgrading to trixie for one of my Kirkwood boxes (Dell M300) went well. But it seems to

1. Mess up with the busybox-syslogd (log to ram). The memory buffer is empty, and the system log is now at /var/log/syslog. It does not hurt, since I mount /tmp to tmpfs anyway.

2. My boot time is twice what it has been, Not sure where is the delay. sendmail seems suspicious.

3. The initramfs grew about 30% from ~6MB to ~9MB, and I recompressed with lzma, still the same. More investigation needed. From what I've learned, initramfs-tools probably still has problem since version 146.

All these gotchas could be because this rootfs is heavy. It has most of all my experiments on it.

IMO, as usual, I don't think we should use the initial Debian (i.e. 13.0). At the minimum, wait until the first point release. Historically, the initial release has been buggy.

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/26/2025 10:24PM by bodhi.

Could someone on Debian trixie non-systemd system do this

ping 8.8.8.8
ping google.com

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/27/2025 04:27PM by bodhi.

This is on a M300

# ps -ef | grep [s]ystemd
root       357     1  0 Jul09 ?        00:00:01 /lib/systemd/systemd-udevd

~# ping -c 4 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=9.51 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=116 time=8.89 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=116 time=9.70 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=116 time=13.0 ms

# ping -c 4 google.com
PING google.com (142.251.46.174) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from nuq04s44-in-f14.1e100.net (142.251.46.174): icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=8.86 ms
64 bytes from nuq04s44-in-f14.1e100.net (142.251.46.174): icmp_seq=2 ttl=116 time=11.0 ms
64 bytes from nuq04s44-in-f14.1e100.net (142.251.46.174): icmp_seq=3 ttl=116 time=9.70 ms
64 bytes from nuq04s44-in-f14.1e100.net (142.251.46.174): icmp_seq=4 ttl=116 time=11.8 ms

Thanks eno789!

The reason I'm curious because I lost the resolv.conf setting during the upgrade. The new resolver wiped out this file, instead of repopulating it.

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I'm using DHCP, I think the DHCP client would overwrite /etc/resolv.conf unless you explicitly tell it not to.
https://wiki.debian.org/resolv.conf

Quote
bodhi
> 2. My boot time is twice what it has been, Not
> sure where is the delay. sendmail seems
> suspicious.

This was ntpd problem, probably it did not like the old config. So I purged the old ntp package and install ntpsec. Boot time is normal again.

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More curtain call news for Debian armel.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1113679#71
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1113679#81

Note that armel is still supported in Linux kernel. A couple years from now, it might come to a situation where we will be running the latest Linux kernel, but with a frozen Debian trixie (13.x).

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2025 11:46PM by bodhi.

Hmmm, I was really hoping/expecting armel to end up in ports .... I always assumed there was a wider install base than there actually seems to be.

Working on Trixie support has me realizing some parts of even armhf are less used too, I had to patch the armhf netinstaller image I use as my base because it didn't have the changes needed for /lib -> /usr/lib/ ..... presumably meaning I'm the only one actually using them since they can't actually boot as-is.

(I also had to swap ntpd-> systemd-timesyncd in my install processes)

I'm slowly moving my debian images to a secondary output my buildroot-based image process since it's looking like that has a longer future ahead of it at this point.

> Working on Trixie support has me realizing some
> parts of even armhf are less used too, I had to
> patch the armhf netinstaller image I use as my
> base because it didn't have the changes needed for
> /lib -> /usr/lib/ ..... presumably meaning I'm the
> only one actually using them since they can't
> actually boot as-is.

I think armhf will be safe for a while longer. Even though it's 32-bit, low RAM 64-bit boards get the best of both world if running 64-bit kernel and armhf userspace.

-bodhi
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