Debian v2.0 ("Hamm") Beta Test

June 24th, 1998

Though significantly delayed, Debian 2.0 (Hamm) has officially been released as beta for the i386 and m68k architectures. The packages on ftp.debian.org are up to date and ready for downloads. Mirror sites are busy catching up on the last few changes and should be complete by the end of the day (Thursday morning at the absolute latest).

Debian 2.0 marks the move from the older libc5 to the newer libc6. Since this is a significant change, we took a long time to make sure everything was working correctly.

Changes to Hamm are restricted to important bug fixes so you should encounter relatively few changes between now and the official release. I would encourage those interested to go ahead with the Debian 1.3 (Bo) to 2.0 upgrade. This final bit of testing should help eliminate the remaining upgrade/install problems likely to be encountered.

Debian distributions for Alpha, Sparc, and PowerPC are also available under the unstable tree. They will likely release with Debian 2.1.

To avoid problems in just upgrading packages via dpkg, dselect, or dftp (due to possible libc5/libc6 conflicts), it is recommended that the following upgrade procedure be followed. This document can be found at http://bhmit1.home.ml.org/deb/faq and ../../releases/hamm/upgrade.faq (dead link) on the current site.

Q: How do I upgrade from an earlier version of Debian?
A: There are several methods:

  1. autoup.sh — This is a script that will upgrade the programs in the correct order, even download the deb's for you. Because of the continuing changes to the archive, a tar archive of the packages that were available at the time autoup.sh was last released is provided. Versions are available at:
    ../../releases/hamm/autoup/ (dead link) the current site
    http://www.taz.net.au/autoup/
    http://debian.vicnet.net.au/autoup/
    http://www.uk.debian.org/releases/hamm/autoup (dead link) (ftp: also okay)
  2. apt-get — This is the command line part of Debian's future package manager. It knows how to order packages and will download them from a local archive, http, and ftp sites. It is able to merge the info from several sites, so you can use your cd, an up to date mirror, and a non-us site for the best mix of speed, variety, and recentness (if you can't tell, I like this one). Just run apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade. The bo version is at: http://www.debian.org/~jgg/ and on the current site. The hamm version is in project/experimental.
  3. Do it by hand. There is a howto at: http://www.gate.net/~storm/FAQ/libc5-libc6-Mini-HOWTO.html but the autoup.sh simply automates this, so most users won't want to do this.