Pretty cool! I almost missed that Debian 10.3 got released last week. This is a corrective release, meaning it’s about improving stability and security rather than about introducing major innovations.
Upgrade Debian 10.2 to 10.3
I only have one dedicated server running Debian 10, and will possibly reinstall even that – turns out I’m much more used to CentOS servers than anything else.
BUT this server is still there, so why not upgrade it?
Step 1: Update Debian repositories
First, we run apt-get update. I never noticed it before, but apparently this command is clever enough to recognize that InRelease changes version from 10.2 to 10.3 (see the last line of the output):
apt-get dist-upgrade brings all the packages to the current release of your Debian/Ubuntu distro. In my case,
root@srv:~ # apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Calculating upgrade… Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
linux-headers-4.19.0-8-amd64 linux-headers-4.19.0-8-common linux-image-4.19.0-8-amd64
The following packages will be upgraded:
base-files e2fsprogs git-man libboost-iostreams1.67.0 libboost-system1.67.0 libcom-err2 libcups2 libcupsimage2 libext2fs2 libgnutls30 libidn2-0
libnss-systemd libopenjp2-7 libpam-systemd libpython3.7 libpython3.7-dev libpython3.7-minimal libpython3.7-stdlib libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules
libsasl2-modules-db libss2 libsystemd0 libtiff5 libtimedate-perl libudev1 linux-compiler-gcc-8-x86 linux-headers-amd64 linux-image-amd64 linux-kbuild-4.19
linux-libc-dev openssh-client openssh-server openssh-sftp-server python-apt python-apt-common python3-apt python3.7 python3.7-dev python3.7-minimal sudo
systemd systemd-sysv udev
44 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 129 MB of archives.
After this operation, 325 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
...
Step 3: Reboot (when convenient)
You don’t have to reboot immediately. The biggest reason to do it is to start using new version of Linux kernel, but there’s hardly a specific update in minor kernel upgrade that justifies immediate downtime.
Here’s the kernel version before reboot:
root@srv:~ # uname -a
Linux srv.ts.fm 4.19.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.67-2+deb10u2 (2019-11-11) x86_64 GNU/Linux
When possible, you should do a graceful reboot:
root@srv:~ # shutdown -r now
After system is back online, we can see that it’s running Debian Buster 10.3 now:
greys@srv:~ $ uname -a
Linux srv.ts.fm 4.19.0-8-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.98-1 (2020-01-26) x86_64 GNU/Linux
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Debian Linux
